Stario: Haven Tower is a city-builder with a difference, in that you must build vertically, reaching incredible heights and working your way far, far above the cloud line of a world wrecked by cataclysm.
Developed by Stargate Games, it begins with a recap of the events that led to the end of the world which necessitated this health and safety nightmare. Instead of expanding districts, you add layers to your Miracle Tower, building everything your society needs around the outer edges of each platform.
So you’ll need to add plantations to grow food, dust collectors to well, collect dust, and dew harvesters for water. As with any other builder, you’ll also need to create workstations and factories, expanding your industry and unlocking new advancements.
A research lab helps you to develop new technologies such as spiritual layers, glass, or better power supplies. Of course, your most important resource is people, so you’ll need to build dwellings and then supply them with everything they need. You can distribute labour by order of priority however you choose, but you’ll generally need everything running at once all the time.
You’ll also need to make sure each layer has what it needs as it’s difficult to transport resources over multiple layers. So you will steadily create larger and more elaborate platforms, some dedicated entirely to homes, or industry, or storage. Periodically you’ll be hit by disasters like sandstorms that last an age and do serious damage to your infrastructure, reducing your population and depleting your stores. It adds an element of danger, and a literal ticking clock as you always know when the next one is coming.
Aesthetically it’s a very pretty game, with a lovely atmosphere and a steadily developing visual identity that sees your buildings evolve as you research new materials and methods. Zoom in close and you’ll see cute little “Towertizens” (yes, I hate that word too) working or lounging, though nowhere near the numbers suggested by your population counter.
Much of the challenge here comes in developing vertical supply chains and establishing trade systems between layers, which itself feels like a unique element for the genre. Adding special layers allows you to call upon Miracles to aid your development and protect your people, ushering them towards prosperity in the sky.
There are no real politics to worry about and there aren’t any other towers as far as I’ve seen, so the entire experience is self-contained to just your people and their struggles. It means you’ve less to worry about overall, and as a result even during the preview I felt that I was just building for the sake of it, or because the tooltips were telling me to. There didn’t seem to be much of a goal beyond “keep going up”, and as prosperous as it is to grow through different layers of the sky, I had to wonder what the overall point of it was.
That said, Stario: Haven Tower is a good-looking, fairly chilled city-builder with a unique perspective that doesn’t demand all that much from you. It reminded me of Airborne Kingdom but without the exploration, and I found it relaxing if not overly thrilling. It will be interesting to see what Stargate add to it throughout early access.
Stario: Haven Tower is in early access on PC via Steam.
