The Colonists Review

The Colonists is no, not a game about imperialism, despite what I originally thought when I saw the title. Instead, this settlement building game is about developing a civilisation of robots. The opening cutscene outlines the premise: a team of robots has escaped servitude on Earth to colonise another planet where they can fulfill their ultimate dream―to be human. 

What, then, does being human mean?

In The Colonists, that means building houses and roads, extracting resources, fighting over territory, and then building more things to extract more resources. After you place a construction project somewhere on your plot of land, robots get to work developing buildings, mines, farms, and more. Different boxes, such as one tracking your overall productivity and one tracking resource output by day, allow close management for efficiency. 

In summary, you must balance resource harvesting and production to manage the rate of expansion. Workshops help you research new and more complicated tech projects, which require resources that take several more steps to produce. Your goal is to develop an efficient system of productivity, driving this civilisation forward towards technological advancement. 

Hefty machinery

Everything about this game is… fine. There are adorable robots, the basic rules are easy to learn, and crafting an efficient system of production and demand is satisfying. I imagine this is how I’d feel as a CEO in a movie; when my crew’s productivity in the top left of the screen goes up into the green, there’s the satisfaction of a job well done without dealing with the messiness of human teams (because… your workers are robots and don’t have feelings). Though The Colonists can feel like a grind when your chain of production is waiting on just a few units of wood or stone to continue, it’s easy to lose track of time playing when construction is going smoothly. The quantitative objectives given to you as challenges, such as building a monument in a certain amount of time, make your building feel purposeful, though there’s also a sandbox mode for a different playstyle.

However, despite these perfectly functional qualities, something feels missing. The initial conceit of the game drew me in: robots trying to be human? Sounds cute. But I soon wondered what The Colonists is suggesting about the human condition. Despite the game implying that the robots are built to simulate humans, they’re content to spend all their time laboring like, well, robots. The result is that while they succeed in imitating the growth of human civilisation, they fail to become human themselves.

What makes us human

In fact, it’s the very things that don’t revolve around work that make us distinct among the animal kingdom, such as love, community, family, art, and memory―not the soulless extraction of natural resources. We wield language creatively in ways no other animals can; we record history and pass on collective memories; we tell moving stories and mourn our dead. Though these robots do make art, the game has it be in service of productivity; for example, monuments will raise productivity of robots in an area. That these robots can’t do and strive for these makes them an unconvincing imitation of humanity.

The Colonists poses these robots as aiming to recreate human civilisation, but they are missing the most essential aspect of civilisation: humanity. These robots clearly have some sort of subjectivity, since they were able to recognize and resist servitude, but they fail to resemble humans in meaningful ways. Perhaps these robots are unable to shake their mechanical nature, and the joyful aspects of what makes us human are things that cannot be programmed for.

Though the game posits itself as adorable and relaxing, a depressing vision of humanity arises through its narrative (or lack thereof), one in which the aspects of humanity represented are colonisation, environmental destruction, war, and work. The game tells us one thing but shows us another. A story woven into the chapters or levels of the game that develops these ideas might help address this contradiction. Until then, this game is merely a settler simulation with solid mechanics―a well-oiled machine that’s lacking in heart.