These two city building games play very differently, but share a dark view of the environment.

It can be difficult to find the time to complete a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week. In our biweekly column Short game we suggest video games that can be started and ended a weekend.

Normally I only cover one game at a time in short game, but after playing 20 minutes from metropolis and islanders back to back, it is difficult not to think about their mutual relations. Both are puzzle games about building cities, with very different approaches to gameplay and style. Despite this, they both feel like they have a similar vision of humanity's exploitative relationship with nature.

First, 20 minutes from metropolis is like an accelerated version of SimCitywhere you are trying to build the best city possible in 20 minutes. Each building costs resources (stone, wood, metal or plastic), derived from logging, mountain building or mining ruin. Each site has only a limited amount of resources. To acquire them, you must create "work", produced in the apartments. In order to produce this work, the apartments need food from farms and landfills where they can send waste. All this put together and you have a simple ecosystem, but complex and nested.

The ultimate goal, however, is not to create the most populous city. Instead, you earn points by creating parks. The puzzle of the game, therefore, is to create an efficient city that can continuously produce the resources you need, while allowing you to leverage resources to create more parks.

islanders On the other hand, you are trying to build the best possible settlement on a procedure generated island. At each turn, you are given a number of different buildings that you can place on the island, and the location counts for a lot; what you place nearby gives you a number of positive or negative points depending on the synergy with which they are. In general, this process makes sense in the way you want to build a city. Houses and mansions are close to downtown, for example, but also parks. Tree cutters like to be near trees. Shamanic huts are very similar to nature and any other building.

By earning enough points in a round, you will get a new set of buildings to add to your island. This continues until you run out of space, you do not earn enough points or you do not pass on a new island (which unlocks beyond a certain threshold of points on your island current). The puzzle becomes a complex issue: how to maximize your points now to have more tricks in the future, while leaving room for future rounds to maximize point synergies?

Both games are great: 20 minutes from metropolis scratches SimCity / Cities: Horizons Want to make an interconnected city or system work effectively, but in a condensed and sometimes hectic form. Conversely, islanders is a slower and more relaxed experience where you can take your time planning and placing your buildings to maximize synergies between them to improve your score. But the final state of each game leaves the world around these cities devoid of the nature that existed at the beginning, even in some cases, even destroyed.

In 20 minutes from metropolis, When you finish digging a mountain, harvesting farmland or cutting a forest, the tile turns into a prairie pristine tile. Nothing repopulates; the forests do not grow back or spread, nor do the farms and meadow slabs do nothing. As you move forward, you must quickly expand your city to connect to the most remote resources. This leaves your city looking like a strange organism in a petri dish looking for nutrients while you are cleaning mountains or anything else on your way.

In islandersyou often start on an island trying to avoid destroying nature. Lumberjacks, a building that you can sometimes get very early, earn points by being near the trees, but only earn them when they are placed. So as the island begins to fill up, it becomes more advantageous to install a building where there are trees because you have fewer opportunities to earn points. Finally, it leaves you with loggers who are surrounded by houses or farms instead of trees. When you're done with an island, it's usually devoid of nature and densely populated with buildings.

It seems somewhat intrinsic to the kind of city builder that this involves changing the nature around you. But often in games like SimCity or Cities: Horizonsyou can find more environmentally friendly ways of doing things. This could mean creating forests or other green spaces in your city to try to compensate for the nature that your city moves, although it does not always have a mechanical effect on the game. an aesthetic impact.

Maybe this aspect stands out more because 20 minutes from metropolis and islanders are more simplified versions of a city builder. Unlike a longer urban building game, you are not trying to create something lasting that will last from tens to hundreds of hours, but only something that will last about 20 minutes before throwing it away so that you can move on to the next city. Strangely, this short delay can give the impression of a more honest simulation of how humans build cities.

islanders was created by Grizzly Games, and 20 minutes from metropolis was created by Dejobaan Games. You can receive 20 minutes from metropolis with a Humble monthly subscription ($ 12 per month). islanders is available on Steam for $ 4.99. Both games are Windows only. It takes about 20 minutes to an hour to complete one lap each.