Best of all, the frequent conversations actually feel like realistic banter between grown-up goofballs who are well aware of their generations' collective shortcomings. The all-in-one-day adventure sees Connie and his friends/roommates preparing for the birthday shindig while sharing all sorts of arguments, debates, worries, and concerns. (An early admission from Connie that 30 pretty much sneaks up on you while you're wondering where the last decade went is right on the money, and from that moment on I knew I was watching a flick I could relate to.) Much of Lurking in Suburbia focuses on the conversations, preparations, and hijinks surrounding Connie's 30th birthday party - but don't go mistaking this flick for something akin to Van Wilder or American Pie.Īltieri employs a device that doesn't work too often: He allows his lead character to narrate directly to the audience, an approach that generally comes off as lazy, obnoxious, or tiresome, but here it works particularly well - due in no small part to the straightforward and impressively insightful screenplay. Newcomer Joe Egender delivers a strong lead performance as the almost-30 Conrad (Connie) Stevens, a semi-shiftless and quietly fun-loving grown-up kid who's growing just a little bit tired of his extended battle with arrested development.
Despite a plot synopsis that feels exceedingly familiar (and some DVD packaging that's more than a little misleading), Lurking is a sly, personal, and low-key indie comedy that manages to become more accessible and likable the longer it goes on. Another nice mechanism is that tiles from the market can be played upside down as small lakes, which provides a cash infusion but also allows you to take a tile out of the game that's useless to you but helpful to an opponent.Filmed on a seriously small budget with a crew of about twelve people, Mitchell Altieri's Lurking in Suburbia is one of those "festival-type flicks" that you may catch on the Sundance channel one night and find yourself more than a little surprised at how engaging the thing is. This game seems to lean heavily toward being a muliplayer solitaire puzzle at first glance, but once everyone is familiar with managing the feedback loops between reputation, population, and income, and with the scoring goals that are available, denying other players what you think they need becomes pretty competitive.
Once the market is emptied out, the game ends and players score based on population, plus additional public and secret individual scoring goals that you draw at the start of each game. Some of the tiles' effects work spatially (placing residential areas next to a highway hurts your town's reputation while placing businesses there makes them more profitable), others work based on what else is in your city (building schools helps your reputation based on how many residential areas you have), and some affect other players' cities. This simple mechanism creates delightfully rich feedback loops that take a number of plays to fully appreciate – grow too quickly without an economic base and your town stagnates, unable to afford the development you need to serve your population but bring in too much business or industry and nobody will want to live there.īuying tiles for your city isn't just an exercise in math, though – building your city is a spatial and temporal puzzle, with a limited ability to impact the other players' cities as well. The population tally (which serves as the game's scoring mechanism) models the disadvantages of urban growth in a very clever and elegant way – every so often on the track there's a red line, and when your population surpasses it you lose one point of income (more expensive municipal services) and one point of reputation (more density/pollution/crime/whatever). Players take turns buying hexagonal tiles from an ever-changing market and placing them in their town to develop their city in ways that affect its population, income, and reputation. At heart, Suburbia is a simple, subtle economic simulation with three moving parts. The art is streamlined to the point of austerity, there is almost no luck, and the game is unashamed to show off its mathematical guts.
Suburbia is a technocrat's take on urban planning.