Restoring humanity involves a lot of menial labor. Together, you and your kin must forge a new life atop the biomass. The ways in which you can contribute to society can be summed up in three broad categories: mining, fighting, and building. Mining produces mineral and other raw materials that are then used at crafting stations back in town to build new buildings and expand your city. As your city grows, however, you have to watch out for encroaching enemies that will decimate all your hard work should they get too close.

Mining is done at locations called islands – distant caves and other, more bizarre, formations jutting up out of the otherwise featureless landscape. A transit system hauls the mined materials from dig sites back into town, where they can be collected and brought to the crafting station for processing. If you have the right combination of materials, you can initiate a simple slide puzzle representing the construction of your chosen building. Finish the puzzle, and the building appears.

Of course, gathering enough materials for any one building would take ages for a single person by themselves. The Tomorrow Children is a commutative experience where each player is working towards the common goal of expanding their town – of which there are several. At present, a Tomorrow Child’s work is never done, as there isn’t an ultimate goal other than expansion and exploration.

Your only adversaries – apart from greedy players who try and hoard all the materials – are the large, mostly docile monsters wandering the void. Every so slowly, they will approach your settlements, and when one gets too close someone will have to jump on the guns and bring it down. The Tomorrow Children is currently gearing up for its first public beta – the details of which you can see in the trailer below – and the full game coming to PS4 sometime next year.

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And after going hands-on with the closed-Alpha we’re still bemused: we found ourselves mining gold nuggets from deep within an enormous soapstone foot without a clear understanding of why, and logging in each day to find our town had been attacked, its citizens deployed elsewhere.

But we also got to dig deep into the class system, which offers Citizen, Miner, Commander, Radio Officer, Engineer and Combatant variants. You’re still free to work the mines as an Engineer or blast away at the Izverg invaders as a Citizen, but you’ll get bonuses depending on your class so you’re gently guided into a certain role.

In its early Alpha phase, the game’s systems remain a mystery, but essentially it’s about performing tasks for the greater good and earning spendable rewards for it… which enable you to work more efficiently. (Communism.) It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma, this one, and unravelling it is the real hook.

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