I have a memory of talking to Tomas Sala over Zoom or whatnot. He's in a room in his house cluttered with children's toys - I think his family had just welcomed a new baby - and he was talking about his game The Falconeer with such quiet passion, talking about an idea so good he could barely seem to control it. I have a memory of all that, and of thinking - oh, this guy is special.
And then The Falconeer came out and it was special, an aerial combat game with lovely controls, but also - and more importantly for me, I think - an astonishing sense of place. Its oceans and sparse outcroppings of land where tentative, often warlike civilisations were forming like coral? This didn't feel so much like something Sala was making up. It felt like something he had found and was showing to us. It had this astonishing fictional integrity, which was all the more powerful for the gaps that the game left for the player to fill in.
When I heard Sala's next game, Bulwark, was set in the same universe and was a sort of city-builder - emphasis on "sort of" - I knew it was going to be special, too. Special and odd and defying easy category, which, let's face it, is one of the best things you can say about a game. I pictured something a bit like Townscaper, and so I was wonderfully befuddled when I loaded up the game's evolving demo on Steam and - what? A tutorial? A campaign? What is this exactly?