What kind of diseased mind makes a city builder with actual building physics

Set on weeny post-apocalyptic islands, no less

The creators of All Will Fall are pariahs, as far as I'm concerned. You should warn your children to avoid them. If you encounter them in the street, you should jerk away with a muttered oath, making a sign to avert evil spirits - for these are the scumbags who've decided to develop a city-building game in which all the buildings and building materials are subject to realworld physics. A city-building game that takes place on small, post-apocalyptic islands, where the only way to expand is upward.

"Playing Jenga with human lives" is how they summarise it, the wastrels. Here's a trailer.

The premise is that the world is being swallowed by the ocean. You lead a small boatload of wild-eyed survivors, searching for the last few scraps of land to found a civilisation on. Having located a few sparse tiles of solid footing, you must wrestle with a physics-based building system that "challenges you to consider real-world construction aspects when building your intricate multi-level city in all three dimensions".

Everything you build may collapse, pancaking the civvies inside, unless it's delicately stacked and balanced. Do not construct your city like you're absent-mindedly filling a shopping trolley at Tescos, with soft fruits carefully placed in the bottom and 20 family-sized tins of bratwurst heaped on top. Exercise discretion. "There is a high-risk, high-reward aspect to it," the Steam page adds. "For example, you can find various ways to reach much-needed resource nodes by building elaborate bridges or ladders. Or - save some space for more production by stacking the housing quarters on top of each other."

All this, and you still have to tackle the traditional post-apocalytic mayoral dilemma of whether to be a kindly custodian who causes everybody to perish of malnutrition, or a ruthless tyrant who secures overall survival at the cost of being universally despised. There are three survivor factions, each with different skills - Engineers can operate cranes, Sailors can sail boats, and Workers handle anything that isn't a boat or a crane, I guess. Factions have wants and needs: you likely won't be able to satisfy them all, so it's a good thing you can impose martial law to shut up the moaners.

I'm not clear on how complex All Will Fall really is when you discount the risk of towns accidentally flattening themselves, but the social and story elements sound quite labyrinthine. "Each colony you build will deal with unique challenges, foundation layouts, circumstances and random events - like storms, mysterious structures emerging from the ocean, political coups, unexpected newcomers, food shortages, and more," the developers hint. "Learn from your mistakes, unlock new locations on the global map, and embark on the next dangerous adventure once the inevitable calamity comes to destroy the city."

All mock-outrage aside, this sounds brilliant. I'm absurdly bad at Jenga and look forward to making a very short-lived Tower of Babel out of driftwood. All Will Fall is out this year, and you can sign up to a public playtest on Steam.