Flotsam review – Waterworld becomes a cosy post-apocalyptic city builder

Surviving the apocalypse has never been so relaxing as in this excellent mix of survival game and city builder, set on a waterlogged future Earth.

The post-apocalypse is a famously popular setting for video games. From Fallout’s survivalist role-players to the harrowing events of The Last Of Us, game makers have long been drawn to the idea of a world reset, primed for reimagining. And, naturally, such games tend to be rather gloomy affairs.

Not so Flotsam, which might be gaming’s most cheerful take on life after the end of everything. Finally released as a full game, following years in early access, Flotsam is set in a world almost entirely flooded, where a handful of small islands and building tops make up the remaining landscape. The population appears reduced to almost nothing, and there is next to nowhere left to grow food.

And yet developer Pajama Llama Games’ creation welcomes you to a place of glorious weather, rolling blue seas, oceanic beauty, and an optimistic effort to build a community and thrive.

The heart of the game is your new home: a plucky, pootling boat that you constantly expand with walkways, pontoons, and floating structures, until you find yourself piloting a vast, self-sufficient floating village. Everything you use to build that undersized empire will have to be pulled from the waves or constructed onboard. Which brings us to Flotsam’s other half, where you explore a vast map, scavenging for supplies and welcoming new survivors to your community.

When it comes to the fundamentals of building out a prosperous settlement with a functioning and balanced ecosystem, things are broadly comparable to the likes of classics such as SimCity; although in the case of Flotsam the focus is on the finer details of producing food, building housing, and workshops, purifying water, and keeping your residents happy and healthy.

So, where SimCity might have asked you to place an entire industrial region in a single click, in Flotsam the level of detail demands you have the correct ingredients for meals, enough wood dried and shaped to build your next extension, and all manner of other considerations.

That might make things sound like rather too much of a mundane chore list, but so brilliantly balanced are Flotsam’s systems that the game is deeply captivating and rewarding. Constantly working to keep going has never felt quite so wonderful. There’s an intimacy to the detail that really connects you with your floating home, making you really care about its survival.

Flotsam is a very hard game to put down, because there’s always a few more things you can do to improve your settlement. And with those tasks completed you’ll open up yet more ways to make your home a little more efficient, beautiful, or capable.

The game’s core loop sees you hopping back and forth between the map screen – where you’ll direct your boat to points of interest – and the zoomed in world screen where you scoop up resources, scavenge islands for everything from food to metal scraps, set your inhabitants to work, and maintain and expand your boat.

After that, you can hop back to the map and let everyone carry on as you navigate. Early on, you’ll focus on gathering plastic and wood from the sea, to build the likes of storage areas and your first homes and workshops. Initially the workshops let you dry salt water-drenched driftwood, cut planks to shape, and form plastic into simple building materials. In the opening hour you might also craft a water purifying tower or expand a network of jetty-like pathways that let your residents – known as drifters – get about their work.

In time, you’ll even construct your own humming power network, schools, areas for rest and recreation, seaweed farms, smaller fishing and scavenging boats, and specialised workshops that create food, rope, firewood, and much else besides – all of which will have to work in balanced harmony.

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That harmony is yours to orchestrate. The Pajama Llama team’s greatest achievement, in the case of Flotsam, is making that effort a wonderfully relaxing, gentle, interesting experience, without watering down the wider genre’s complexity and nuance.

Nevertheless, Flotsam could do with having its tutorial integrated into the game’s opening, rather than existing as a separate entity. The opening chapter of the Flotsam experience does give you nudges in the right direction, but you might find yourself momentarily bewildered by an inability to source a certain material or reaching for your phone to search how a system works (and fortunately, there is plenty of information online, thanks to the game’s years in early access).

You’ll soon feel entirely in control though, a master of your floating future. Because the systems in Flotsam make such plain sense, and because of that close-up level of detail where you can see seaweed fluttering in the wind on racks and dried wood being carried to the sawmill. Despite its imperfect onboarding, Flotsam is the ideal game if you’ve always wanted to crack the city building genre, but never really found your gateway.

If you’re a genre obsessive, things might feel a little familiar in terms of the process of building out that bustling ecosystem. And yet the addition of the exploration and survival element should give you a taste of something distinct. And whatever kind of player you are, you may well long for more elaborate quests and missions, or maybe in-narrative events that drastically shift the dynamic of strategies you deploy. Still, even without those things, there are many, many hours of pleasure to be found in the waters of Flotsam.

The process of scooping up new survivors and integrating them into your community is always delightful, too. Rather than fuss over the fate of a city of millions, in Flotsam new recruits never arrive in crowds. Many hours in, you might still be able to count your populace on two hands – or maybe three. Again, Flotsam has a marvellous sense of knowing the world you build at an individual level, right down to the names of each resident.

The overall result is one of the most rewarding and charming city builders of recent times. The emphasis is almost always on progress, success, and community, and while you do have to knuckle down to the serious business of keeping Drifters fed, watered, and content, rarely is Flotsam a game about struggle or failure.

It wants you to do well, and that is a pleasure to experience. Even if you do squeeze yourself into a resource bottleneck, where your stores are full and you don’t have what you need to build a way forward, the solutions are always straightforward and typically immediate. Flotsam doesn’t patronise or keep things too easy; rather, it makes facing its challenges a joy.

And when that joy plays out over a blue and pleasant land, where people are collaborative and kind, it makes Flotsam a very nice place to escape to, even if a global disaster has struck. It is still a post-apocalyptic world, where survival dominates your every thought, but saving the future of humanity has rarely been so playful. And play is what video games are meant to do well.

Format: PC
Price: £19.99
Publisher: Stray Fawn Publishing
Developer: Pajama Llama Games
Release Date: 4th December 2025
Age Rating: N/A

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