izigame.me

This is a rogue-lite fantasy city builder set in a world plagued by unnatural storms that are somehow mystically connected to its continent-spanning forests. The basic unit of gameplay is building a single town... but to keep things fresh, not only do different town locations change the resources, challenges, and sometimes bonuses you'll have on your plate, but the building blueprints and 'cornerstones' (passive, permanent buffs, sometimes with drawbacks) available to you will be reshuffled each time, changing the strategies available to you.
Your goal is the same every time: build the town's Reputation to a specified value. Do that, and the Queen will consider your expedition a success (granting you, as her Viceroy, experience), and the town will be able to gather meta-resources from its surrounding area. The experience (which is also gained by completing Deeds, which are basically achievements) levels you up, unlocking new villager races, new buildings, and new cornerstones, as well as unlocking higher tiers of upgrades to the capital city. Those upgrades are purchased with the meta-resources, each giving a very small but permanent buff to some aspect of the gameplay, along with various more specific benefits, such as increasing the amount and variety of goods you can start with for each town or making certain blueprints available automatically forever instead of having to choose them from one of your random blueprint selections as you play.
However, how you get to the required Reputation level is up to you, and with the dice being rolled fresh for each town, you'll often find yourself having to improvise on that. As the years pass in a given town, the Queen will send you orders; complying with her wishes will always net you one point of Reputation, along with giving you some supplies, villagers, or other boons depending on what it was, and in many cases this can form the backbone of getting to your target. But what if the Queen decides to have a royal tantrum and repeatedly demands you ship her luxury goods from a settlement that has no way of producing them, or wants you to have eighteen harpies living in town when none seem to want to move in? You could try exploring the forest more aggressively in hopes of finding boxes of goodies to send back to her citadel to placate her (presuming you have the tools to ship them)... or you could just stuff your villagers full of their favorite foods and get them drunk until they sing your praises loudly enough for her to relent!
Of course, there are sticking points to all of these approaches. The forest does not appreciate your presence, especially if you're hacking away madly in your quest to find treats for Her Majesty. Glades uncovered, lumberjacks employed, overall population, and even the passage of time will raise its Hostility. For much of the time, this is just a constant, oppressive feeling of malevolence that interferes with your quest to get your people to send the Crown glowing reviews of your managerial finesse (and, potentially, can cause people to give up and leave if it gets too unbearable.) However, each year is broken into three seasons - a pleasant and productive Drizzle season, followed by Clearance when crops are gathered in... and then finally the Storm, when the forest truly makes its displeasure known. Not only is the force of its hostility far more palpable during the Storm, truly testing your ability to keep your villagers from running screaming back to the Smoldering City, but if the Hostility is high enough it can trigger additional nasty consequences, which vary with each town. Maybe the ground will become muddy and gelatinous, slowing everyone down. Maybe the rain will spread rot into your fields, causing dangerous flora to spread... or maybe your poor villagers will simply start dying under a barrage of hail. Most of these consequences can be blocked with the correct preparations (for example, proper housing will prevent hail-related fatalities), but not all, and unless you have your people blissed out on pie and booze, the sheer terror of the forest's malevolence may send them running regardless. And if you decide to avoid this by having a light touch on the forest? Well, the Queen's Impatience is growing with every passing day, and if she doesn't see steady progress from you she may just cancel your entire expedition. (This is, in fact, the only way I know of to 'lose' a town, other than allowing all of your people to die.)
Each successfully established town can be used as a launching point for future expeditions, giving you new choices for sections of the wilderness to exploit for the resources the Smoldering City needs to thrive... but not forever. The Queen's Impatience may be your effective time limit for working on a single town, but the reason she's not willing to wait forever is that the storms won't either. The power behind the unnatural storms is always building, and every few decades they reach a cataclysmic crescendo - a Blightstorm - that wipes the world clean in a sort of Biblical flood, regenerating the entire world map and making you start fresh. Only the Smoldering City is spared, protected by some mysterious power wielded by the Queen Herself. But your experience and your meta-progress remain, leaving you slightly better equipped each time to resume your trek into the wilds, presumably to restock the City's larders and warehouses that were depleted by having basically the entire sentient population of the world huddled within its walls for a few years.
As of the time of this writing, that's basically the entire gameplay loop (in cursory overview, at least) - the 'goal', if there is one, is just to build up the Smoldering City over time. However, there's one more missing piece the devs have announced for the near future that I think will serve as the lynchpin to make the game feel complete. A world map overhaul is coming, after which you will have an additional meta-goal during each Blight cycle: to gather fragments of ancient seals and reach the cores of their ruined remains to reforge them, before the Blightstorm forces you back to the City again. Once reforged, these seals will, as I understand it, remain across Blightstorm cycles, and in fact, each one completed will slow the building of the storm's wrath, increasing the number of years (and therefore, potentially, the number of settlements you can complete) before the next catastrophic cleansing of the world. If my understanding is correct, reforging all of the seals will completely suppress the Blightstorms, allowing the world to be permanently resettled and letting the Queen (and her Viceroy) finally rest, their people's future secured. Even as the game is now, I can recommend it without reservation; with that last piece it'll become a true top-shelf offering in my opinion.