The Wandering Village

CONTAINS VERY MINOR SPOILERS I love this game. If you like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), this is very close to that. Opening animation is a clear clue of the inspiration. Instead of Ombus (giant insects) you have an Onbu, a dinosaur like slow moving cute creature! Basically you have a mobile city with somewhat limited resources, and you have to keep the city and people running. What I like is that the pace at which new tech is researched and resources accumulate. Just enough to make you feel the progress, but not so fast that you end up with ridiculous amounts of stuff that you can trade easily. Once I ended up with tons of water, which turned out to be disadvantage because I needed saltwater to get salt and all the storage space was used! Allocating work force is damn near perfect mechanics wise. If you do not need fisheries, just click lock symbol and the facility closes and workers are sent elsewhere. If you need to open up, just unlock and you get the place working very quickly. If you need more workers somewhere else, just adjust the amount of workers in one work place from 4 to 1 or so on. Also, already when you're building new work place you can already click that once it's ready, new workforce will start working there. Real salt here is that environment changes. When Onbu moves, there are two paths every now and then and you can choose one (in the beginning Onbu doesn't trust you and doesn't do what you tell it to do). Different areas have different kind of resources, humidity, temperature and environmental risks, and you have to adjust things like water collecting and plants to farm for those changes. You can't solve by relying on just one source, but if you look what's ahead you can actually plan your next moves. This is really fun, and if you fail to react it doesn't feel like the game is against you, it's just that you didn't plan ahead despite all the information available. Worker allocation is perfect for this: Close air wells, open saltwater collectors once you move to sea area. The explore-element is nice, you can send exploration teams to search for resources from abandoned mines, laboratories, villages, oases etc. and sometimes you get a random event with three choices: risky, less risky or no risk. Result is somewhat random, and I like it because once the less-risky was actually the risky one. You don't know what happens next, which gives this game more story like feeling. Game is kind a like Last Train Home but without battle element. Story of The Wandering Village is a bit bittersweet, and somewhat deep with humanity destroying the nature in their greed, but now having one last change to make things right. This brings another element to the game: moral choices. The player can exploit the Onbu, but doing so hurts the animal and it's trust in you. This makes game easier, since some resources become more abundant. There are some game scenes where for a reward you can do this, like actually causing pain to the Onbu to impress a poet in need of inspiration. Luckily narration made it clear that I do not have to do this to advance the game, so whatever to see the Onbu as beloved animal or as a source of resources is up to you. Some small cons: Only bigger minus thing is the rather odd mechanics of village happiness, but after you get better apartments, bakery to make enough bread and decorations around houses this is no longer a problem. I get it that villagers are unhappy and might rebel and leave the city when there is no food, but sometimes everything seems to be OK and they still complain. Usually a nice festival solves that (temporary boost to happiness), which makes sense in "bread and circuses" way of ruling. Another thing are the herbs: they are very important, but for some reason you can only cultivate like 20, no matter how many plots a herbalist has. I even build two herbalists, and still the amount was limited though I had every resource needed to cultivate them. Also, I miss "produce until you have X amount" mechanic for work places. The disabling of workplaces does the trick, but this would make the game easier to manage.