General The Most Brutal City-Building or Management Game – Which One Broke You?

[Al]

Some city builders let you create a sprawling metropolis with ease. Others make you fight for every brick, every meal, every miserable citizen just trying to survive another day. Whether it’s brutal survival mechanics, punishing logistics, or just the slow, painful realization that you’ve doomed yourself hours ago, these games don’t hold back.

Which one challenged you the most?

• Banished – A single bad winter, one mismanaged food supply, and suddenly your thriving village is a ghost town. Survival city-building at its harshest.
• Frostpunk – Not just a city builder, but a test of your moral limits. Will you force child labor? Will you become a dictator just to keep the city alive? Every choice hurts.
• Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic – Logistics complexity dialed up to 11. One miscalculation in supply chains and suddenly your socialist utopia is an industrial wasteland.
• SimCity 3000 – Not survival-focused, but brutal in a different way - your entire city can collapse under budget mismanagement, debt spirals, or just one misplaced landfill.

Which game made you rethink every decision? And more importantly - did you actually overcome it, or did you just accept the failure and start over?