Gaming

It's frightfully early in the year to be bustling, but I can't get enough of the crowded streets of ancient "Chinese-style" RPG The Bustling World. The latest trailer is a series of sweeping yet intimate, colourful urban cross-sections, showing dozens of NPCs selling fish, shaking hands on balconies, shouldering barrels, dancing with fans, honing their feng shui, and various other pursuits that allegedly form part of full NPC life simulations. It's like scrutinising a Hitman level from above, except that all of these people have evolving relationships and sleeping patterns and they might hunt you down if you murder any of their relatives. Me, I just want to play Where's Wally.

That's a slice from the game's minutiae. At its most expansive, The Bustling World threatens to become a 4X strategy game: you can take charge of factions, lead armies, design houses, build cities of your own, and organise production chains into - my goodness, it sounds like they're trying to make it a factory sim as well? "Bustling" is certainly the word. "Bursting" might be more appropriate. "Breaking" seems like a possibility. This is a cross-genre pudding of fearful, perhaps ill-advised scale. The trailer proudly advertises itself as real-time and in-engine, but I can't quite believe they're going to pull it all off.