A team of seasoned strategy game developers turned indie are working on a fresh, stimulating concept that will be released this year: ColdRidge, a game about lone explorers exploring an ever-changing frontier with a stunning American West aesthetic and singing French cowboys. Each year in ColdRidge, you set out from the central city to complete missions for your guild, exploring the surrounding area in search of what you need.
Complete enough missions before the end of the year and you’ll be able to earn the money you need to survive, spending the surplus on indefinite bonuses. Don’t pay the ever-increasing guild tax and you’ll be left out in the icy when winter comes to refresh the entire frontier.
However, you can only take on a few contracts each month and travel so far: Eight hexes of movement. So if you have to find six deer and five trees, you have to be quick and effective, risking what might be on the undisclosed map versus what you already know. It gets harder over time: When the month ends and you turn in contracts, the guild immediately exhausts everything you’ve marked for the taking.
I spent some time with the pre-release demo and found it to be a very compelling idea: play just the first, stimulating installment of a Civilization-style 4X game, over and over again, exploring from the first settlement. You try to mark resources, plan routes, and be effective in how your movement not only explores the fresh map but also uses the resources you pass. Leave a huge wasteland near the beginning, and your other expeditions this year will have to waste movement to get through it to the good stuff.
ColdRidge is the brainchild of Frog Collective, a studio founded by former Lead Designer and Technical Designer Amplitudestudio known for the 2021 4X strategy game series Endless and Humankind, Frog Collective aims to release one or two compact indie games per year.
The public demo of ColdRidge is scheduled to be released on July 23. You can find ColdRidge on Steam. You can find Frog Collective on their website.
