Gamers, Mexicans and history buffs: rejoice! This week sees the release of Aztec: The Last Sun, a city-building simulator that lets you take the reins of Tenochtitlán, the ancient Mexica (or Aztec) capital. Created by Polish game designers Play2Chill, the project is the culmination of more than three years of hard work, historical review and craft.
The game takes place at the dawn of the Mexica empire, as you look to establish your grand capital in Lake Texcoco. Set in the stylized world of ancient Mesoamerica, you play as the divine leader of the Mexica, the Tlatoani, tasked with building the city of Tenochtitlán in the waters of Lake Texcoco.
What is gameplay like?
The team at Play2Chill provided Mexico News Daily with an advance copy of the game, so we were able to test out everything Aztecs: The Last Sun has to offer.
During the day, you grow your city by adding different structures, including housing, resource collecting, academies and temples. At night, however, work stops as your people take cover from the Moon Goddess’s curse, put on the populus after she declared war on the Sun. The blood zone, powered by the blood of captives, commoners and nobles who follow you, is the only thing keeping the curse at bay. Fate lies in your hands: will you protect your people and grow your empire, or will you fall to the tyranny of the moon?
Choices matter as you decide what to do with new captives and your population, assigning them to specific roles, putting them into hard labor, or sacrificing them to appease the Gods and maintain your protective blood zone. It is a fine balance for survival between keeping your population alive, which risks unemployment and the failure of your protective blood zone not activating at night, and excessive bloodletting, which weakens the population’s trust in you but gives you more Grace with the Gods to avoid cataclysms.
Expansive gameplay elements include scouting and exploration, which reveal a map far greater than Tenochtitlán, opening the world up to other cities and trade routes in the Valley of México. The Calendar system assigns a patron god to each day, who has an unpredictable and powerful impact on the world. It also shows upcoming events and allows the player to prepare accordingly.
The day/night cycle triggering a supernatural antagonist is one of the many survival gameplay elements that gives Aztecs: The Last Sun a unique feel. Homelessness is a constant factor as your city expands, and housing needs to be built around canals and reservoirs to avoid sickness and loss of trust. Harvesting mud is essential for land reclamation and molding your environment to fit your building style. Food management is flexible and feels important, even telling you how many meals each citizen has per day.
To find out why a team of developers in Poland decided to create a game set in pre-Hispanic Mexico, we caught up with developer Paweł Brągoszewski, who helped bring the ancient city streets of Tenochtitlán to life.
”Frankly, the obvious setting for [city building] games is medieval Europe. There are hundreds of games about medieval Europe. So we didn’t want to do another medieval Europe castle builder or something. We wanted to have an unusual, interesting setting,” explained Brągoszewski.
Historical accuracy
Keeping Aztecs: The Last Sun as accurate as possible was a major concern for the team, who are based in Warsaw. While none of the team had ever visited Mexico, they were determined to do what they could to create an immersive, vibrant world that resembled the ancient capital as much as possible.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing on the historical front though, as Brągoszewski explains. ”We created the very first trailer for the game, a video teaser for the game it is no longer available and in that teaser, [we] made all sorts of mistakes with the architecture. [We] mixed Mayan architecture and Aztec architecture, all sorts of stuff.”
“When we released that, we got a very, very nice, critical but very constructive letter from [a historian] from Mexico. We contacted him and we corrected [the game] ourselves to make sure [that] if we show something that really existed, it is accurate.”
“He provided us with a huge document about what we did wrong and what should be corrected and what to do.” It is clear that the team took this information and used it to rework the game — with great results.
The building processes are historically accurate too — as Tlatloani, you will assign workers to create new chinampas, helping raise your city from the lake just as the Mexica did centuries before. Your people will need jobs, homes and will use traditional tools and wear the traditional clothes of 15th century Mexica.
Time for the obvious question, though: How does the game handle the human sacrifices for which the Mexica were so infamous?
“We had a lot of design discussions on how to incorporate the gods and religion, which was important as the empire, but we didn’t want to do the obvious crazy bloodbath stuff,” Brągoszewski said. While blood does play an essential role in the game (as it did in real life), it is simply a part of everyday life, rather than an all-consuming goal to be met at all costs.
The religious element presents the one historical question mark in the game. But, within the overarching narrative and the immersive gameplay, sorcerers and angry gods feel like an exciting augmentation to real life, rather than a lazy stereotype of Indigenous blood magic.
Is Aztecs: The Last Sun good?
Game journalist and developer James Springer described the game as “not being the most complex city-builder out there, but its artistic style, focus on survival and unique environment, coupled with its small twists on genre gameplay mechanics, make it a fun and relaxing experience, depending on your difficulty setting. The characters and storytelling are also worth mentioning, despite the noticeable AI-created voiceovers.”
So far, the game is still in Early Access mode, meaning there is more development to come. “We have like two chapters. This is like a full story. There is everything we wanted in the game in terms of gameplay, buildings and features,” Brągoszewski said.
“Everything is there, but there will be another chapter added after the early access.”
For fans of Frostpunk, Tropico or Sid Meier’s Civilization, there is a lot here to love. For fans of Mexican history, the care that the team at Play2Chill have taken to ensure their game is historically accurate is evident in every moment. So if you fancy your chances of being the next Mexica god king, head over to Steam and try your hand at building an empire!
Aztecs: The Last Sun is available in Early Access on Steam from September 23rd
James Springer is a freelance journalist interested in history, culture, software development and gaming. Chris Havler-Barrett is the Features Editor at Mexico News Daily.
