Illuminaria

I put Illuminaria in front of two different kinds of players in my head when I think about who this is actually for: the spreadsheet veteran who wants something to relax with on a Tuesday night, and the newcomer who's been eyeing colony sims but bounced off Dwarf Fortress's learning cliff. Selva Interactive, a three-person studio from Guatemala, clearly had that second person in mind when they built this. The robot swarm AI handles task distribution on its own, responding to player-placed build markers and resource designations without demanding micro-level attention. You point, they work. That design philosophy is both the game's biggest strength and, eventually, its ceiling. The structure across Illuminaria's five regions gives it more shape than a typical sandbox. Each region introduces new resources and a fresh tech tree to research, and progression is gated by lighting beacons and liberating enemy-held bases rather than by raw score. Two-minute-to-understand, the loop goes: mine resources, expand your base footprint in the finite cave space available, queue up turret defenses loaded with ammunition before the next darkness raid, then send a golem army into dungeon-like expeditions for the rare materials your tech tree needs next. The auto-battle expedition system is the lightest layer of the game, closer to a loot run than a tactics challenge, but it feeds directly into crafting and research in a way that keeps you dipping back in. Completion on normal difficulty lands somewhere in the 15-20 hour range, which is a comfortable finish line for a game at this price tier. Where the depth-first crowd will start tapping the desk is in the mid-game. Resource management stays simple throughout, which means the second half of a region often turns into a waiting game: queue research, accumulate materials, watch the bots run their routes. The robot task-priority system also has rough edges. Community feedback is consistent on one point: bots will ignore a wall-build job right next to the teleporter and wander across the entire cave to do something less urgent. There is no manual priority override, which stings when a raid is incoming and your defenses are half-finished. Enemy attacks on secondary bases can also go unreported until actual contact with your reactor, so players who split attention across multiple active bases will get caught flat-footed more than once. Still, for what Illuminaria is designed to be, it delivers. Selva Interactive consciously aimed to strip out the inaccessibility that keeps newcomers away from strategy sims, and that goal is achieved. The 2D visual style is clean and readable, controller support is real and functional, and the goal-oriented campaign structure means you always know what the next objective is. There is no mod ecosystem to speak of and no endless mode yet, which limits long-term retention for players who finish the campaign and want more. Hard mode bumps enemy health and damage in expeditions and increases disaster frequency, but it is the same map, not procedurally generated content. If you already have 500 hours in Factorio or Rimworld, Illuminaria will feel like a demo of a bigger game. If you want a gentle on-ramp into the colony-sim and tower-defense space that you can actually finish in a weekend, it does that job cleanly and with minimal frustration.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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