It's great to see the genre branching out.
The city-building genre has gone from strength to strength the last few years (admittedly with the unfortunate exception of Cities Skylines 2) Developers far and wide have spun out virtual urban planning from its modern metropolitan origins in dozens of weird and wonderful ways. We’ve built cities in frozen wastelands, in the skies, and in a world populated entirely by beavers. There’s even a city-builder set on the back of a dinosaur.
Now, Dark Switch invites you to embrace your inner wood elf, by constructing a fantasy metropolis around the trunk of an enormous tree. One might even be tempted to call it a Lothlorien simulator, if Tolkien’s elvish woodland was threatened by a creeping fog that drives people mad.
Revealed at the PC Gaming Show 2025, Dark Switch’s key twist on the format is that the city you’ll be building will be predominantly vertical. You need not only to construct buildings, but also wooden platforms to support them, creating your own foundations that sprawl from the tree’s vast trunk, and connecting these tiers together with ladders and elevators.
Constructing this city requires a vast amount of resources, so you’ll need to build a variety of resource gathering and production buildings. At a basic level, this means building logging outposts, fisheries, and metal collecting stations. But more advanced structures include lumberjack walkers—giant, caterpillar-like tree-felling machines.
As well as being your home, the tree is your main refuge from the fog. Not only is the fog capable of terrorising your citizens in and of itself, there are also things that lurk within it that will actively attack your city. You can push back the fog by constructing light sources on the ground, while magical watchtowers will help you keep the fog’s spectral lurkers away.
But the tree cannot provide everything you need, so you’ll have to dispatch expeditions into the fog, searching ancient ruins for technologies that will help you improve your city and better understand how to overcome the fog. In addition, this being a more survivalist city-builder, you’ll also have to make tough choices that will define the game’s narrative and shape your society.
I’m always up for a new twist on city-building, and the idea of constructing an elvish haven is certainly one that appeals. There’s no release date for Dark Switch yet, but you can find out more info about the game on its Steam page.
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