Mountaintop city-builder Laysara: Summit Kingdom is out right now on PC

Quite OK Games today shadow dropped its city-builder on a summit title Laysara: Summit Kingdom as part of the Triple-I Initiative showcase.

Laysara: Summit Kingdom is available in early access on Steam right now, having had its release announced during today’s Triple-I Initiative showcase. The game takes the city-building genre we all know and love and ascends it, quite literally, to the peaks of the mightiest mountains. Instead of crafting a small settlement in a forest before seeing it become a sprawling city, this game has you carve out an existence for a culture living in one of the harshest environments in the world.

Rebuild a kingdom while working within a culture’s caste system in Laysara: Summit Kingdom

In Laysara: Summit Kingdom, your people have been forced out of the lowlands and into the mountains. Throughout the campaign, you’ll build unique towns on every mountain and establish trade networks between them to help the kingdom thrive once more.

However, the mountains your people have settled in are far from danger-free, and it’s not just the altitude that can kill. Every mountain has different challenges for your settlements to face, including avalanches, lack of resources, and others that only have what your people need close to treacherous glaciers.

The game somehow manages to make all this danger look beautiful, though. Your towns pocket each mountain with strange staircases and bridges spanning between them forming trade routes and main pathways. It reminds me of images of isolated villages in remote parts of the world, or the lines of flags between rocks and buildings you see in photos of Everest Base Camp.

Should you manage to master the mountain and build to its peak, you can even erect structures that allow people and goods to travel between neighboring mountains. The idea of growing enough food on a mountain to trade with another mountain settlement feels bonkers, but in this game, it’s daily life just as easy as visiting some relatives.

Reaching this point means you’ve not only mastered the elements on the mountains, redirecting snow and water but have built the society around its three-tier caste system well enough that society is flourishing even in these harsh environments.

I love that Laysara: Summit Kingdom looks not only at what civilization would be if it were forced to build and survive in the flat parts between sheer drops on the edges of tectonic plates, but also at how culture can survive and even be relied upon to help people survive no mater the adversities they face.