Climb up and hold on, so we can get a good glimpse at the world of The Wandering Village.
In my personal opinion, a hallmark of a good city-building sim is a killer atmosphere. After all, a world that is intriguing and interesting is vital to a game in which you are building a colony in that world. A good idea can go a long way, and world-building off of that idea makes for a fun experience, since exploring that world and making use of what it has to offer is half the fun of such a game.
When it comes to a good city-building sim, I would say that The Wandering Village is off to an incredibly strong start. As we head into this review, however, it is very important to note that the game is in a very early state, and the copy that was played was an early demo version. With that out of the way, let’s dive in!
The Wandering Village, developed by Stray Fawn Studio, starts with a rather dreary premise: the world as it was known is slowly filling up with toxic spores, rendering wide swathes of the world unlivable. As your group of survivors searches the world for a place to call home once again, they come across something extraordinary: a fabled Onbu, a massive, reptilian creature with a habitable back. You and your survivors climb aboard and move to recreate a livable future atop your Onbu’s back.
As the prior explanation might have implied, there is an additional facet to growing your settlement in The Wandering Village: not only must you manage the needs and wants of your citizens, but you also need to attend to your enormous traveling companion. The Onbu is a living being, just as all of your people are, and needs attention and proper care just as they do. Part of the goal of The Wandering Village is to form a proper relationship with the Onbu, as a symbiotic relationship is vital to both of your lives in this dangerous world.
The Wandering Village‘s gameplay in regards to your actual settlement isn’t too unorthodox, save for the specific dealings with the Onbu, which will be covered in a bit. You have some pretty standard mechanics that are staples to colony sims: there are resources to gather, buildings of all sorts to construct, and tech to research to improve your settlement.
Your main resources in the early game are going to be stone and wood, which appear rather readily on the Onbu’s back at first. Later on, you unlock buildings that allow you to process wood and stone to create other, more advanced buildings. While it might seem as though you’ll quickly run out of trees to chop down and stones to mine on the Onbu’s back, there are buildings later that allow you to both set scouts out into the world to gather resources and create resources on the Onbu’s back to harvest later.
In terms of research, there is a pretty typical tech tree, which unlocks various buildings primarily. However, it also unlocks commands for your Onbu, which are important to managing your settlement once things get a little more advanced. There was a helpful little feature that came up when your current tech was finished researching, in which you were offered some recommendations as to how to proceed, which I thought was a good touch. It allowed me to familiarize myself with the tech tree without going too deep in on my first go around, though I later went back in and figured things out, and eventually deviated from the recommendations.
And now to touch on how The Wandering Village is different: The Onbu. As stated prior, the Onbu is a giant creature upon which you have settled. It wanders the world, carrying you on its back, and to properly manage your settlement, you will have to properly manage the Onbu.
In addition to the typical tech unlocks, some buildings specifically work to take care of or exploit your Onbu, which allows you to increase or decrease the amount of trust it has in you and your settlement. In addition, The Wandering Village features ‘commands’, which are, well… commands.
Once you’ve constructed the proper building, you can attempt to give the Onbu commands. Notice the word ‘attempt’. If the Onbu doesn’t trust you and your settlement, it will simply refuse to listen to your commands. As of right now, the list of commands is short. It includes commanding the Onbu to move in three simple ways (walking, running, and sitting down), to eat, and to sleep. There is also the occasional fork in the road, which you can choose from, choosing north or south.
To increase your Onbu’s trust in you, you can feed it food (using a trebuchet!) and take care of it when it gets poisoned by the various toxic plants in the world. Though I didn’t unlock them, due to the rather short time The Wandering Village‘s demo had to offer, you can also decrease the Onbu’s trust in you, done primarily by mining into it for resources. How horrific!
Even though The Wandering Village is just a demo at the moment, I still found a couple of things that made me scratch my head.
The first thing was the game’s art style, or rather, how the art styles were combined. In The Wandering Village, there is both 2D and 3D art. The villagers were 2D sprites walking around, while the Onbu was an impressive 3D model, and the buildings themselves had something sort of in between, a bit of a 2.5D style. Now, to me, everything looked great on its own.
However, I felt like the art styles of the villagers and the Onbu clashed. It was a bit jarring when I would start with the Onbu view and see its majestic model slowly plodding through the environments, then hop back to the settlement view and suddenly see some much more simplistic sprites toddling around, and vice versa. Again, all of the art in The Wandering Village looks great, but it’s simply strange for me that these different styles are placed right next to each other.
Another thing I found a bit annoying was the fact that certain things didn’t seem to be elaborated on, specifically the Onbu’s trust in me and specific civilians.
Onbu happiness seems to me rather vital in The Wandering Village, as giving commands to the Onbu to get it to do certain things at certain times seems almost necessary for later management. And yet, from what I could find, there was no concrete number for how the Onbu felt about me, so I couldn’t tell if I needed to be doing more for it or not. In a type of game that requires a lot of knowledge of the colony’s goings-on, it seems to me like a stat like the Onbu’s happiness would be invaluable to keep track of, since it is quite literally the base of the colony.
In the same vein of needing precise information, I found it hard to micromanage my civilians, primarily once becoming poisoned became a problem. Even though I only had around 30 citizens near the end of The Wandering Village, I still found myself searching around for people whenever the game would let me know that people were poisoned, had trouble finding them due to them wandering off to do a task that hadn’t been completed in a corner of the Onbu. I feel like a simple list of all my villagers could help immensely, especially since I don’t have manual control of what every single one does.
My final trouble with The Wandering Village‘s demo was starvation. In the second half of the game, I had only one crop I could grow, which was beets, due to my following the tech tree’s recommendations. I don’t know if this is an issue because of me simply having bad luck with biome spawns, or if perhaps rushing a different crop (wheat, in this case, as it is all that’s available as an alternative) would help, but I found that my villagers were quickly and frequently running out of food due to the biomes.
At the moment, there are three biomes in The Wandering Village: Jungles, Deserts, and Mountains. Each has different levels of toxicity, humidity, and temperature. The two that are relevant here are humidity, which Deserts lack, and temperature, which Mountains lack. In Deserts, you cannot get water from your designated water building at all, and from what I could see, Mountains simply were too cold to grow beets in.
What this meant for my demo playthrough was that, in two out of the three biomes, I was simply not able to produce enough food, despite having two farms and three water towers. Again, I’m not sure if I was simply unlucky enough to hit multiple Desert and Mountain areas chained together, or if beets are simply not sustainable past the first 20 days.
Despite these small issues, however, I enjoyed The Wandering Village. The post-apocalyptic setting was charming and fairly unique, and the premise was incredibly fun to play with. I loved looking at the Onbu, and I’m excited to see him again as the game develops!
And that’s the end of our preview for The Wandering Village Demo. If you thought the game looked interesting, definitely make sure to wishlist it on Steam here, as it helps the developers! A more public demo will be available during the Steam NEXT Fest starting on the 21st, and a private beta can be signed up for here.
For more gaming-related news, make sure to check out other articles here on GamesCreed! A good place to start would be checking out some of our other game reviews!
