A unique city-builder has recently been released into Early Access and it has caught the attention of a lot of players. After having the chance to try it out myself, I have to say that it has definitely earned the attention it has been getting! Stray Fawn Studio has developed a title that is easy to get absorbed and invested in. It’s a good thing they teamed up with WhisperGames to publish The Wandering Village because I didn’t know I needed a city-builder title with a heavy focus on survival until now.

Gameplay

When you go to start your game, it will have you choose from three different difficulty options. If you are unfamiliar with city-builders or perhaps want to be guided through the process of this game specifically, there is a guide version that provides tutorial hints throughout. For those that don’t want the tutorial, you can choose one of two difficulty options depending on how hard you want the game to be.

Going in, I went ahead without the guide and on my first attempt managed to last 132 days. While that felt low, my multiple playthroughs told me otherwise. This game is a tough one and having to manage both the Onbu creature and your citizens is a different kind of challenge. I did check out the guided version and it definitely would be helpful to someone new to the genre. No matter which difficulty you go with though, this game doesn’t seem to have an ending and is a last-as-long-as-you-can type of challenge.

Getting the civilization started, you will be given a chunk of land on the back of the large wandering creature known as the Onbu. The size of the land will always be the same every playthrough, but the placement of dirt and grass patches will change every new game playthrough. These layouts will tell you how to get started as you need to know where you are going to have your various functional aspects.

Once you get familiar with everything you need to run the city, you can start your playthroughs knowing that you need to plan your farm, mushroom farm, and herb farm plots then build the city around those locations. No matter what you think needs to be done at the beginning, I urge you to get these three farms started up before anything else and a few air wells to collect water for the farms. You don’t know what lies ahead and you will always need food and a way to heal from poison.

From there, you’ll want to build some workshops, a research building, and all the other buildings. Personally, I have been skipping over building them homes because I never saw them use them. Otherwise, you will need to make sure you have everything you need to work with the Onbu and everything you need to give your civilization the basics of food, medicine, and active labor. Don’t forget to have harvesters focusing on maintaining resources and people working on upgrading items into slabs and planks for a variety of buildings. Once you have this, it is time to focus on getting more people into your civilization.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see any way to get the citizens to make children, which I really thought would have been an option, so the only way you can grow as a society is by finding nomads in the Onbu’s pathway or by running into people while sending out your scavengers. This was a bit of a disappointment and felt like an extra struggle, but maybe that will change in the future.

Other than managing your civilization, you will need to monitor the Onbu. You are in charge of feeding, healing, and curing it. Plus, you need to earn its trust so when you go to the world map you can give it directions that it will listen to. If the Onbu doesn’t trust you, it won’t listen to any of your commands. This is the roughest part of the game because if you see a large poison forest to the left and you want the Onbu to keep straight, but he doesn’t listen to you, there is a chance he turns left. Then, to make it worse, he may not listen to your command to run when it comes to getting through the forest! I’ve literally had my Onbu go to sleep in the middle of a poison forest before and it turned one of my best runs into an instant failure.

To detail why the poison forest is so bad, aside from the obvious fact that it poisons your villagers and Onbu, is what it does to your land. When you go through a poison forest, your land will have random spouts of poisoned spots that appear all over. This could be poisoned crops, trees, grass, and so on. Making matters worse, if you don’t tend to it, it will spread and while tending to it, your villagers will get poisoned. This means you need to have a full set of harvesters at the ready when you go through a poison forest to clear the poisoned land and a full stock of herbs and doctors to heal them up as they get poisoned from the work.

Expectations

They definitely have this game on the right track, but it definitely seems to be missing some aspects that I hope to see added. As I mentioned before, it is weird that I can’t grow my civilization naturally and have to simply find nomads. It would be great to have that added to the game and could give a nice purpose to building housing.

Other than that, unless the goal is to keep the game hard enough that it is a huge challenge to last even a year in-game, they may need to space out the biomes a bit more. I felt like I left green pastures and desert biomes much too fast and the constant switching of crop types took a toll on my civilization every time. Speaking of, I hope they can add some more crop options into the game. Beets, Corn, Wheat, Tomatoes, and Cactus are a great start, but why not Strawberries and Blueberries which can last in the cold weather better?

The last thing I would like to see them focus on is giving the player more concise control. When it came to moving people around to different jobs in the village, it is practically a guessing game. This is really frustrating to work with and I would like to simply pluck people from one job and put them into another one specifically. Let me decide what is an important job more directly rather than having to lock every building before moving people around. The same goes when I have extra people join - they just go wherever. I have figured out how to kind of work with this setup, but there is always a lack of sense in my control of my people.

Verdict

The Wandering Village is an amazing city builder that is easy to let absorb hours of my game time! While you can save your progress at any time in the game, I always ended up going through my playthrough attempts in one sitting because I just kept wanting to see how long I could last. Reaching day 213 is my best so far and I feel like I was so close to reaching a real milestone with less than half a year to go in-game. I look forward to seeing what more they do to improve this game before it leaves early access, but I am already set to recommend this title to anyone with the patience for the genre.