I'd been eyeing this for a while because I love a good city builder, and it seems like there's a weird deficit for those in the fantasy genre. Got it with some store credit and hung out for a few hours and it just didn't really strike anything with me in the way I'd expect from being advertised as "the best part of city builders made into a rogue game."
I can't pin it exactly, but it feels equally too simplistic and too maximalist? Having to move buildings around constantly to fit them into a harvesting radius means you're not designing an aesthetic town as much as functional, fluid town, and the size of the build space means you always have to build roads out into new glades and move camps way far out from the village centers, so none of the satisfaction comes from placing buildings and more from "numbers go up, now the queen is less mad at me." It's fine, but it's not engaging the parts of my brain I was expecting it to, and honestly just makes me want to play Loop Hero more - an equally basic game that's at least a little more addicting to me and allows you to spend some time building a cohesive fantasy world with little implied stories playing out within it. Here, it feels like the world does not matter past a means of production, the things you're doing don't matter, and thus the time you're spending doesn't matter. Maybe that changes after a solid 30 hours or so, but I'm seeing other people's reviews saying it stays true for quite a while.

Reviewed on Apr 26, 2024


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