Manor Lords publisher signs Junxions, a surprisingly riveting sandbox traffic simulation game

Hooded Horse, the publisher of Manor Lords, Against the Storm, and many other titles, has announced that it’s signed CyberStorm’s upcoming sandbox simulation game, Junxions. In it, players craft the perfect transportation system for bustling city streets, and it looks quite satisfying.

Junxions is, for me, the best part of any city management game like Cities Skylines 2. Once you’ve outlined where your roads need to be and placed all the businesses, housing, industrial units, and everything else a city needs, it’s time to get to work on efficiency. This means looking at your traffic and working out where the bottlenecks are because there are always bottlenecks, and spending hours reworking the roads until traffic jams are ancient history.

Titivate traffic to your heart’s content

Junxions will be released in early access in 2025 and will require players to construct intricate transport systems across a variety of maps. You can play through a series of hand-crafted challenges, hit sandbox mode to test out just how much of a mess you can make with dozens of travel systems at once, or import a real neighborhood into the game to fix up.

I have to say, I’m pretty excited about pulling a few of the local towns into Junxions because it’s been well over a century, and several local councils still refuse to change so that traffic doesn’t come to a halt during school pickup.

I believe partnering with Hooded Horse will unlock the full potential of Junxions and make it the ultimate traffic simulation game. Together, we’ll deliver Junxions to more players than ever and, more importantly, continue working on our dream of developing the perfect city simulation game.

Lead Developer, CyberStorm, Thomas Wagner

Part of what you’ll be doing with each junction you tweak and change is to account for multiple forms of traffic at once. For example, a roundabout has several entrances and exits to consider, and anywhere there are traffic lights, you’ve got to think about the people using them.

There’s so much that’s hard work in city management titles. Even the best ones have flaws you learn while playing and must work around rather than fix. Junxions stands out as a game in the same genre that doubles down on a single aspect to provide what appears to be an uncompromising experience you could play for days and still not get bored of. If it sounds good to you, then check it out on Steam and wishlist it so you don’t miss its early access release next year.