Laysara: Summit Kingdom is a city builder set on mountainsides where players must carve out a new home for a people driven from the lowlands. Developed by Quite OK Games, this is not a game about sprawling across flat terrain with unlimited room to grow. Every settlement clings to a slope, wraps around ridges and pushes upward through vegetation zones toward glacial peaks. The mountains themselves are the obstacle, the resource and the constraint all at once.
Each mountain presents a distinct set of challenges shaped by its form, its vegetation zones, its available resources and its weather. Some offer generous green lowlands for farming while others force reliance on breeding livestock and extracting minerals from regions dangerously close to peak glaciers. No two mountains play the same way. When a settlement lacks a critical resource, players can establish trading routes with other towns they have already built. Every town in the kingdom coexists in symbiosis, forming a network that can be revisited and adjusted as needs shift. This interconnected structure means early decisions ripple forward, and a settlement built hours ago might suddenly become the linchpin of a supply chain for a newer one higher up the range.
Avalanches are a constant threat that cannot be stopped, only managed. Players can afforest key areas to create natural barriers, construct artificial ones to redirect rushing snow, or trigger an avalanche early while it remains manageable. Fail to plan and the result is a buried city.
Moving goods across a mountain is its own puzzle. Destinations might sit on the opposite side of the peak, hundreds of meters higher, behind cliffs, canyons and rivers. Players must build a transport network of roads, bridges and shafts to maintain reliable delivery chains. As a town's population grows so does demand, pushing players to optimise with paved roads, more advanced lifting constructions or the help of yaks. These are not decorative animals. Yaks serve as carriers threading through the network, and the game treats them with the same practical weight as any infrastructure upgrade.
The ultimate goal on each mountain is reaching the summit and raising a temple there. This requires establishing safe routes for carriers to haul enormous amounts of building resources to the peak, where weather is at its deadliest. The summit temple stands as a monument to logistics as much as triumph over the elements. Getting there demands that every production chain, every transport route and every avalanche defence works in concert.
Laysara offers five game modes. A 15-mission campaign tells the story of rebuilding the Kingdom of Laysara, while Challenge mode tests players under tighter constraints. Free Build mode strips away pressure for those who want to construct without consequence. The game is a pure city building experience focused solely on economy, resource management and survival in an inhospitable environment. There are no combat systems or military units. The mountain is the only adversary, and it never stops pushing back.
Published on PC by Future Friends Games with console versions brought to life by co-developer Nejcraft, Laysara is available across all major platforms. Citizens populate each settlement carrying their own needs that must be satisfied for the kingdom to thrive. The higher players build, the thinner the margin for error becomes, until every yak route and every snow barrier is the difference between a flourishing temple town and rubble under ice.