Upcoming city builder from Manor Lords team is like is a sci-fi Cities Skylines 2

Beyond These Stars is singing a very different tune to your typical city-building fare. That song is one of the celestial-sized Kewa, an intergalactic space whale ferrying your people across the stars. While Cities Skylines 2 has you focusing on the municipality of your urban utopia, Beyond These Stars tasks you with living a peaceful coexistence with Kewa, while exploring the cosmos for more resources and life. It’s a city builder on the grandest scale imaginable, and we’ve finally learned even more about it.

From Manor Lords, Against The Storm, and Xenonauts 2 publisher Hooded Horse, Beyond These Stars gives a new sense of character to the best city building games. The wants and needs of your people, called Peeps, aren’t all that matter this time. Kewa has their own desires and goals, and once you learn to communicate with the gigantic creature you’ll have to take them into account as well. Of course, you still need to manage resources and create settlements to help your people thrive, but it’s not in service of a traditional cityscape.

You won’t just be surviving on Kewa either, as the Peeps will find planets that used to belong to their ancestors, which they can resettle. Kewa is your main port of call, but the gargantuan space whale will still move between planets, helping your Peeps expand. Planets act more like outposts, reinforcing the gameplay and expansion you’ll be doing on Kewa’s back.

This is where resources come in. You can always find the core materials needed for base building and population growth on Kewa itself, but anything more advanced requires resources from these planetary outposts. That means, unlike more traditional city builders where you have one location that gets trade from invisible locales, you need to actively explore. Beyond These Stars puts you in control of these networks, and challenges you with keeping everything ticking along smoothly.

Each planet’s infrastructure and resources are allocated by biomes. Every terrestrial body has one ocean and one land biome, each with limited opportunity for growth. You’ll send new foods, materials, ores, and more back to Kewa to grow your main home, collecting a wide range of goods from across the universe. Not every planet is safe though, or even has enough water, so I wouldn’t get too comfortable planetside.

With so many excellent city building games around today, Beyond These Stars is surprising us with something very different. The core loop of expansion and perfection is the same, but this time there’s quite literally a new sense of character.

Balancing Monkey Games and Hooded Horse have pushed Beyond These Stars Steam Early Access into 2025, to “implement everything properly” at launch. You can wishlist the game on Steam here.

If you’re looking for more, there are plenty of upcoming PC games to watch for. Otherwise, dive into all the best strategy games instead.

You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides, or grab our PCGN deals tracker to net yourself some bargains.