A very strange city builder. It's angling for hardcore realism, where your colony could be wiped out by disease, famine, or inclement weather, but in reality none of those things happened. In my one and only 8hr run, I reached a point where my 3rd generation didn't have enough children, so all of my carefully built infrastructure was eventually manned by a skeleton crew as the elderly died off and we waited for people to breed. And that's all I could do: wait. I was never in danger of having the settlement dwindle away to nothing; our educated populace were drowning in food, everyone lived in warm stone houses, the church and tavern kept everyone disgustingly happy, and we wanted for nothing from the trader.
Unfortunately I've just listed almost all the mechanics in base game Banished, and that's why I feel I can write down my thoughts after just one run. I reached a point early on where all the most ambitious projects were finished, and a stable equilibrium was reached. The downfall of my run came because young couples did not have any empty houses to move into to start a family (although they were happy to live in shared houses...) - and once I realised this the problem was solved, but I still faced a decade long wait to salvage the situation. There isn't much to do in between crises - everything ticks along by itself, and crucially you don't have any control over your townspeople. I can't assign villagers a house to live, or a specific job, and there is no other customization or specialization beyond this. The result of this is that when I switched the weighting of jobs, for example increasing the amount of farmers in spring and autumn to sow and harvest the fields, a random villager would be assigned. This sounds innocuous, but you lose a noticeable amount of efficiency if your villager lives far away from their job - they have to walk to work, walk back home when they get hungry, walk back home when they get cold, walk back to deposit resources, and so on. The game compensates for this under the hood by having villagers eventually swap houses with others who live closer to their assigned workplace, but I'm not happy with that lack of autonomy.
It's a fun game nevertheless, and surprisingly relaxed: it's in no rush to leave the 'early game'. It just doesn't feel like there is enough meat on these bones, and after playing around briefly with the megamod series it doesn't feel like mods will solve my issues either. I do like Banished despite complaining about it for several paragraphs straight, and it definitely has a unique realism and mundanity, you just have to be prepared for a very slow-paced, indirect simulation.
