CitaDrill brings a giant drill-city to Steam Next Fest

CitaDrill turns the city-builder into a moving survival machine: the settlement sits inside a dome while a huge drill digs through an infested planet. Rock Paper Shotgun highlighted the game as part of Steam Next Fest, where players can try its demo before the full release planned for 2026. ¹

A city that keeps moving

The premise is unusually literal. Instead of building a town on a fixed patch of land, players guide a drilling settlement through underground environments, breaking blocks to gather resources and expanding the facilities inside the dome. The Steam listing describes a loop built around mining deeper, improving the city and deciding how to spend limited materials. ²

Buildings provide practical bonuses rather than simply decorating the settlement. Pressure valves can manage rising pressure, power lines support other modules and workers can be assigned to keep the operation running. The official description also frames the player as a remote operator responsible for keeping the drill, its crew and its cat-themed operating system alive. ²

That city-management layer is paired with defence. CitaDrill's underground expeditions attract monsters, so the settlement needs weapons and defensive systems as well as production buildings. The source coverage describes the attacks as a slower tower-defence layer, with larger bosses adding a more direct threat to each expedition. ¹

The demo is available during Steam Next Fest

The Steam page lists CitaDrill as an upcoming 2026 release, while the demo gives players an early look at the drilling, building and combat systems. The game is being developed around a colourful pixel-art presentation, with hostile underground biomes, dangerous creatures and the deliberately odd idea of office-style remote work taking place in the abyss. ¹²

Our opinion

CitaDrill has a clear hook that does more work than a familiar genre label: every expansion is attached to the act of digging deeper. That should give the city-builder's resource decisions a built-in sense of risk, because the route forward is also where the next threat is waiting. The demo is the useful test here; it can show whether the drill-city idea produces meaningful pressure or merely a striking setting.