On the surface, this game should have checked many boxes for having aspects of many games I love.
Instead, for me it failed utterly.
A large part of that was initially its terrible UI and tutorialing: For at least 3 key game aspects, the tutorial arrived AFTER I had figured out what needed to be done. Thanks for the jarring popup telling me to press the keys I had just pressed and perform the actions I just did to achieve the result the quest told me to achieve!
The building (radial menu) UI is like it was designed by someone who never played the game. Key items are hidden in category names/icons that have no relation to the thing you're looking for, the worst offenders being the Rabbit Trap being hidden in furniture/decoration section and the tree sapling (non-fruit trees) not being in the orchard section but in the decoration section.
When I got this I was hoping for a gritty, possibly bloody medieval life simulator. What I got instead was a game that insults my intelligence by not allowing me to build more than 5 buildings until I walk to the edge of map and back several times to perform fetch quests.
Then it does so again by having an incredibly politically correct, rigid, period-inaccurate housing and family structure: It seems unmarried men and women cannot be housed together, unmarried men cannot bunk with the player (unexplained: the 2 spare beds are reserved for your future wife and child), children do ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ until they hit 18 but eat food and wood for 18 years, marriage can only happen at 18+ and couples only form within a strict age gap of maximum 10 years. All governed by a trivial +5% per right answer dating sim to improve relations (as player) or mood when 2 NPCs are housed together.
Wow, so brave.
I was promised a 'role playing game', but there are no stats to advance, just buildings to unlock and crafting recipes to buy where my silver vanishes into thin air. There are no dilemmas to face as leader of your new village, no political/tribal decisions or course to plot.
Inventory/storage management is magical, the dedicated storages share map-wide access somehow. The actions/animations of your people do not correlate with what they are producing in any way, the one exception being farmers. Your woodcutter can be stuck pathing all day and still meet his quota.
In short, the realism is on the surface only. The UI is overwhelming and often mislabeled. The social and political simulation doesn't exist. There are no RPG aspects after character creation. The logistics and economics simulation is surface-level and completely trivializes transport and pathing optimization, and gives you zero control over setting maximum production limits to avoid your emotionless, brainless peasants filling every single storage with firewood. Definitely a Pokémon-level comfort game.
