In New Strategy Game Cantata, the Planet Is A Player

When you open up the first map of the new strategy game Cantata, you’re confronted at once with a barrage of blues, pinks and greens. To me, it looked a little like the cover of a pulp sci-fi novel, or the marbled endpaper of an old book, with bright secondary colors swirling together. The landscape is immediately dramatic, but your focus, at first, is on the people inhabiting it: your commanding officer, the Shotar of Mars, is on this planet basically by accident, having chased his enemy, an AI named Vashti, and her army across the galaxy.
After some short exposition, I was free to scroll around the map. In the bottom left corner, just barely in my view, I saw a tile that was on fire, its muted brown-green punctuated by shattered metal and flames. When I clicked on it, I saw it was labeled simply “hurt earth.”
Cantata is a sci-fi strategy game by Afterschool Studio, which was released in Early Access on May 12. It is set on Shoal, a small planet on the edge of the galaxy. While you start off controlling the invading force, the game takes care to emphasize and center the planet itself as a character. It takes its own turn, just as you do; it spawns creatures to attack both your forces and your enemies’, materializing out of thin air. It’s clear from the first moments of the campaign that as bright and beautiful as the landscape appears, you are unwelcome here.
This is further emphasized by the game’s extreme difficulty, at least at this early stage. Gameplay in Cantata combines point and click combat with base-building elements, which involve building a network of factories that supply each other with resources. Most actions you can take are simple. Your units can move and attack, or load into vehicles to travel faster. You can build factories and make supply lines between them, a process I didn’t get the hang of even within several hours of play.