In a wandering village you must think of the environment as a living, breathing entity. Mainly because, well, it is. In a world riddled with poisonous spores that have wiped out much of civilization and nature, a group of nomads have one last chance by climbing atop an onbu, a giant, six-legged dinosaur—thing with a hard, flat back. It is with its own ecosystem that maintains it.
There is fertile soil and natural building materials, and you can also access fresh water by filtering moisture from the air. Yet it all only works if Onbu keeps moving: so you’d better make sure it survives.
(Image credit: Stray Fawn)
For the opening hours of this early access city builder, however, such concerns backfire as soon as you establish your settlement. Food and shelter are pressing concerns, of course, so you have your gang chop down trees and break rocks, then build tents, a berry gatherer’s hut (berries are the only food that can be found on the plateau). grows naturally on), a small farm, air wells, storage units, and so on. As buildings grow, you connect them to strips of dirt road, allowing your eager beaver forearms to glide faster, and the basic necessities of life to sustain themselves.
So far, so common for this kind of game, but it functions smoothly with a clean interface to help you. Setting up a farm, for example, is a matter of painting an area of cropland around an entire house, after adding workers what kind of produce they should choose (to begin with, the only option is beet, But the roster expands).
In fact, you don’t direct individual citizens in The Wandering Village. Instead, you assign staff numbers to establishments that are automatically drawn from a pool of ‘ordinary workers’ (harvesters, carriers and builders), as long as you have some extra. Anyone can do any job if called upon, or reshuffle back to the manual labor force.
(Image credit: Stray Fawn)
And thanks to the animations of your cartoon charges, it’s a pleasure to zoom-in to a close-up view of your village and watch these transitions and other routines. For example, if you allocate an extra kitchen arm, you can have one of your normal employees look for chef whites as they return from farms. Or simply admire as someone else gathers fruit or holds a log over their head, or stops in the pantry to gulp down some beet soup. It’s easy to get caught up in these ordinary lives, until you forget that it’s all happening on the shoulders of a million tons of vegetarians.
Still, you can’t drool for long, because you’re surrounded by a post-apocalyptic landscape, and because the village is always on the move, changing weather and weather conditions don’t come to you, you come to them. Passing through spore clouds is a risk, causing nasty growth on onbu that spreads poison to trees and crops, or infecting villagers, unless you purge them. Now suddenly there is a lot to do. You’ll need a doctor to cure the sick and a herbalist to grow medicine, and that requires scientific research, which requires knowledge. So you’ll need a scavenger hut from which you can send expeditions to the world, bringing back more materials, additional nomads or ancient expertise that is essential to technological progress.
environmental concerns
Meanwhile, different biome types (there are three at the moment, with more outstanding) affect how crops grow. Enter, say, a desert, and you can collect water only by growing a cactus on your farm, and you’re better off collecting another farm to grow heat-resistant corn. More construction, more research. From there, much of your work comes down to strategically opening and closing different workplaces. Maybe a piece of poison is spreading: so you close your mine for a while, stop stone production, or swap doctors for more farm workers, because no one is sick, at least Not less now.
(Image credit: Stray Fawn)
As charming as these travails are, though, the real ‘X’ factor in The Wandering Village is Onbu itself, which is actually a majestic beast, and as it goes mile after mile, you’ll find it more Attention is required. Onbu’s condition is measured by toxicity levels, appetite, fatigue and overall health, and as long as it can find non-contaminated areas for food and sleep, it largely takes care of itself. Eventually, you’ll grow mushrooms that can be mashed into pellets and then launched toward the animal’s mouth, plus an onbu doctor set up, and a great horn through which you can communicate basic commands: Tell it to run through toxic areas, for example, or go north instead of south at a fork in the path.
Without you, in fact, the behemoth will eventually run to its death, and you can’t form a bond with it because it divides your attention. Yet as conditions worsen, you are also given options to take advantage of the organism’s anatomy to make life easier. Collecting its dung for fertilizer is innocent enough, but what about drilling into its back to use its bile as fuel, or to supply rock?
Choose such paths and the punishment is an erosion of trust, causing Onbu to ignore your orders. But it’s your decision how much your relationship turns from symbiotic to parasitic. It is okay, perhaps, that on your way out of the village, your people seem to be bitten, little by little, little by little.
(Image credit: Stray Fawn)
At present, however, it must be said that these decisions are not quite the dilemmas they may be. On the Medium difficulty setting, I managed to reach the game’s current end (though you can continue indefinitely) without getting into Vampiric Quest, and only stared at the game on screen once. More broadly, some events have dramatic consequences as things stand, and the villagers are almost too efficient and easily pleased: you don’t have to work so hard to keep them happy. While there are a lot of features out there, then, another layer of depth and friction will be important in the long run.
Still, The Wandering Village has a strong foundation: Even at this stage, it’s hard to pick faults beyond the lack of challenge. My only complaints are that the notification system isn’t prominent enough, poison plants sometimes hide behind other scenes, and the mouse wheel camera zoom has stopped working a few times, but that’s all. Like the laborers of the village, the arrangements are already being pulled in the same direction.
And that’s the beauty of thinking about The Wandering Village, even if it isn’t the most intense experience. Each person works towards a common goal that takes into account the continued health of the land on which it depends. Despite the poisonous spores and hard work, it is a kind of mini-utopia, devoid of rigid hierarchy, jealousy and greed. Living on Onbu feels like a privilege, so maybe this is the city builder we need right now.
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