Ash & Adam's Existential Treads

My instinct when I see a game pitched as a hybrid of three genres is to brace for a mess where none of them land properly. Existential Treads had me questioning that instinct within the first run. The core conceit is genuinely clever: you pilot a scrappy tank through procedurally generated islands, demolishing the ruins of a collapsed civilization to harvest the scrap and wood that your settler helpers immediately cart back to your growing base. That base then needs gun towers, mortars, bomb factories, and traps arranged with real spatial intent before the next wave of "the Noise" - a rogue AI antagonist with an actual in-world history - rolls in and stress-tests your placement decisions. From a strategic standpoint, the tension is real. Building placement matters because line-of-sight on your defense towers interacts with the sprawl of old-world ruins still scattered around the map. Rushing to demolish enemy spawn structures before a wave hits cuts off future threats but leaves your settlement exposed mid-scavenge. The randomized build order each run means you cannot just repeat a memorized optimal sequence; you adapt, and that is where the game earns its keep. The sniper tower versus basic-tower-with-housing trade-off is the kind of small decision that actually has downstream consequences, and the developers have been patching balance actively since launch - a sniper tower bug that gutted its damage output was caught and fixed fast, which tells you something about how responsive this two-person team is. The honest counterargument is scope. Community feedback is split on run length: some players find the island-by-island structure satisfying in short sessions, while others hit a wall where individual maps feel brief and the progression curve does not escalate meaningfully enough between them. The physics on scrap and wood debris has also drawn criticism for being fiddly rather than fun. These are real concerns for anyone expecting a deep late-game that rewards hundreds of hours. This is not that game. The developers behind it - Ashley Peter (Desktop Dungeons Rewind) and Adam deGrandis (Monaco: What's Yours is Mine) - have clearly made a compact, focused experience by design, and the Steam reception north of 90 percent positive suggests most buyers understand what they are signing up for. For the strategy-adjacent crowd who usually sits out action games: the barrier here is low. The tank controls are straightforward, controller support is in, and the decision layer is approachable enough that you will be optimizing tower placement by run two rather than run twenty. It is a gateway game, and that is not a slight. The procedural level design and random build order give it enough variability to justify multiple sessions even if each individual island clears quickly. Just do not walk in expecting the kind of compounding late-game complexity you get from a city-builder with supply chains and tech trees - this is tighter, faster, and deliberately lighter than that.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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