Lifelines

Each round starts simply: drag a line from a station, or from any pipe already connected to one, to a home showing what it needs. You can branch off existing lines, and if a route is not working you rip it up and redraw it, with every tile going straight back into your stock. That makes experimenting painless, which is part of the cozy feel.

The pressure comes from limits. Pipe stock is finite, each station only serves so many homes and only reaches so far, and two utilities cannot share a tile. Homes that are settled keep asking for more, starting with water and power, then internet and gas, and data centres need their own power before they can serve anyone. When the surface is full, you switch to a deep layer and dig under the other networks, but every dive costs a dig, so you have to choose your crossings.

Elections every five years tie it together. Re-election earns a grant of fresh pipe, dig crews, permits, or express links that cut straight through anything. Rivers and rock need aqueducts and tunnels, which you also win at the ballot box. There are Easy, Normal and Hard settings, three stars per city, endless runs and Steam leaderboards.

Lifelines is on Steam for Windows and macOS, listed at $3.19 in the US on 1 November 2026. It runs on almost anything: any DirectX 11 GPU, 4 GB RAM and 500 MB of storage. It supports mouse-only play, subtitles and a colourblind palette for the four utilities. Steam lists nine interface languages, including Korean and Simplified Chinese.