Wandering Village

Wandering Village is a low-key colony simulator with a twist: the colony in question sits atop a giant, six-legged turtle called an Onbu. Some time ago, the world as people knew it was destroyed, the atmosphere becoming poisonous in most places, and human civilization collapsed. Humans now only survive in isolated pockets. Lo and behold, your humans discover an Onbu, hop aboard, and the game begins.

The gameplay of Wandering Village happens over 3 scales: (1) a bird's-eye view of the village, (2) a view of the Onbu, and (3) the region around the Onbu.

1. At the village scale, you order the construction of buildings and decide how many people to assign to each. Unassigned villagers do the construction and other odd jobs like harvesting wild plants or picking stuff up. You don't control the villagers directly.
2. At the Onbu scale, you interact with the Onbu itself (after you've done the necessary research and construction).
3. At the regional scale, you interact with points of interest and potentially make a choice on where to go next (both these options also have pre-requisites).

The Onbu never stops moving except to sleep. Your first goal is simply to survive atop the Onbu as it moves from biome to biome, encountering various (mostly unavoidable) weather conditions and hazards. Once mere subsistence is taken care of, you can start interacting with the game's main story.

I beat the game on Normal difficulty in 37 hours. I did not feel motivated to play again or buy the DLC.

THE GOOD:

• I think Wandering Village has a really fresh take on the colony sim genre. It's kind of cool for a normally static thing like a village to be so mobile.
• The twin themes of abuse and environmental degredation are very relevant.
• The hand-painted art is nice.
• The Onbu is super cute.
• The game's onboarding and tutorial structure is excellent. I did not have to look up anything online. Everything you need is in the game. I did end up looking up one thing (why not all farm plots get used), but I could have figured that out for myself over time, I think.
• The ending is very dramatic and exciting!

THE BAD:

• The game loop is mainly taken up by micromanagement of the people you assign to buildings. You monitor your resources going up and down over time and then tweak employment some more. At first, I found this process somewhat nerve-wracking, and once I got good at it I found it boring.
• There is a lot of waiting. You can speed up the game, but that puts you at risk of not noticing important resources dropping.
• The storage system is weird. Each storage location can store X quantity of each item type. E.g. a warehouse might be able to store 50 tomatoes, 50 corn, 50 stone blocks, etc. I think I understand why the designers did it this way, to stop you from overstocking just one item type and force you to have some variety, but it just feels really strange. Like, how is it that my warehouse can be almost empty but I can't fit any more tomatoes inside? It feels arbitrary and breaks suspension of disbelief.

THE UGLY:

• It's not possible to rotate the camera view. It's hard to spot things behind trees and buildings.
• I don't like that the game designers expect you to hurt your Onbu, especially given the theme of the game. There are a lot of Steam Achievements for hurting your Onbu in various ways, but no achievement for never hurting the Onbu (which I would have earned!). Sad.