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I really wish I could recommend this game.
I've been hyped for Lakeburg Legacies. I participated in the developer's Discord server before the game was released. I eagerly watched any promotional material previewing gameplay, including the Wholesome Games 2023 showcase. I logged 20 hours in the demo for the game. Post-release, I did my best to maintain hype and provide feedback to the team. I am finally done holding out hope.
Bugs aside, the game just isn't what the promotional material or the tutorial would lead you to believe. Tindra, in the tutorial, enlists you to manage the settlement of Lakeburg--where love is the most important resource of all and the relationships between your settlers will be crucial to your success or failure.
In reality, there is almost no use for "hearts"--the resource generated by love. Resources like stone are far more important. Moreover, the relationships between your villagers are bland and hard to become invested in. After marriage, couples move into homes together. You may peer into each home and read a log which details how their marriages have been faring.
The logs are extremely repetitive between houses. They contain sentences picked by a randomized generator which draws from a bank of pre-written phrases, and there are very few phrases in that bank. All marriages quickly begin to blend into one another and appear the same, with no individuality between houses. The likes and dislikes of each individual participant in a marriage only determines the likelihood that the marriage log will be filled with positive phrases.
In the case of a couple with mutual likes and dislikes, an example phrase might be "Enid still can't stop thinking about Paul". In the case of a couple with conflicting likes and dislikes, an example phrase might be "Enid hates how Paul's family is always visiting without notice".
If you are playing the game on normal difficulty, it is easy to accumulate over 100 villagers. When you have 50 couples, all of whom are in marriages where the same randomly generated events keep appearing in their marriage logs, it is very difficult to care about the marriages between your villagers. What's more is that the name bank for possible villagers in this game is not large enough, meaning many of your villagers will end up having the same name as each other. This also kills any ability to be invested in the lives of your villagers. There is very little sense of individuality.
The game is really just a number-crunching resource management game, where you balance producing enough wood, stone, and lumber to construct new buildings in your village while having enough resources remaining to feed your villagers as well as satisfy their luxury needs for items like jewellery.
That would even be fine by me if the resource management aspect was well-balanced, but it is not.
You may only build 100 houses, even if you have the resources to build more. The game limits you to 100, but it does not warn you of this limit. When managing your resources well, it is easy to build a population of 200+ villagers. After all, the tutorial tells you to prioritize matchmaking couples with high compatibility, which often requires recruiting new villagers to your settlement, as opposed to matchmaking your singles with other single residents of your village (who will likely be elderly widows/widowers).
If you are consistently recruiting outsiders to your settlement for the purpose of making compatible marriages, your population will increase rapidly, especially when the couples begin having children.
When you run out of houses for your villagers and have built all 100 houses, the game gives you no option other than to watch your villagers die of homelessness over time.
Additionally, there are gauges for the overall needs of your settlement. They represent the health, faith, entertainment, and protection levels in Lakeburg. Illicit buildings can pop up and cause major debuffs to these gauges, but that can be countered by placing villagers inside the illicit buildings to counter the debuffs.
Later, you can build "service buildings" to add a buff to these gauges: a theatre, a hospital, a church, and a guard's post.
Even with all these buildings fully staffed with good workers, the biggest debuff to these gauges is population. Therefore, even if you have done an excellent job of doing everything the tutorial told you to do: make strong marriages, manage your resources, and satisfy the needs of your villagers--even if you have staffed all these buildings--the gauges for health, faith, entertainment, and safety will remain quite low. This causes your villagers to get a debuff trait from illness or desperation (previously it was "suicidal", but the devs changed this following criticism), low faith may decrease intelligence, and low protection may decrease morale.
Low morale effects production in your work buildings and the longevity of your villagers.
The game offers you no solution to manage overpopulation. If one of your children grows up to be rather useless in any career, they will consume resources until they die, with no way to remove villagers of your choice from your village.
In other words, if you do successfully manage to build up a prosperous settlement of well-kept villagers, the game punishes you with forced homelessness and low service gauges, leading to decreased longevity, with no way to fix this.
As I write this review, the game still has some fairly debilitating bugs that have been present since launch. The devs have announced that they are planning a 1.1 update that will patch these, however, they stated they would need to work on it for "several weeks". Perhaps I will change this review when the patch rolls out.
Some smaller patches have already been released. These did fix many major bugs! However, other bugs still remain, even some which are supposedly patched (prestige achievements and morale are still bugged for me.)
The devs have responded extremely well to feedback. Perhaps there is hope for Lakeburg Legacies. It has an amazing team behind it. Right now, it is a formulaic, repetitive, number-crunching simulator trying to sell itself as a resource management game where you can form couples and become invested in the individual lives of your settlers. It falls short of this goal.
There are random events that can happen between villagers as they meet each other and form interpersonal connections. These could end up being fun in the future, but right now, it is difficult to care about these pop-up events because you lose track of who your villagers are. They have the same names and the same home lives. They all blur together.
In the event pop-up, you may click on a villager involved and see their character sheet, to remind you of who they are, but this doesn't change your level of attachment to the villager. The villagers remain bland, overly similar to one another, and it is difficult to care about the outcome of an event when you don't care about the individuals involved.
The only instance where I cared about the outcome of an event involved an older male villager being predatory to one of my teenage villagers, following her home. The best course of action was to choose to exile the predatory villager and have him removed from my game, but I was reluctant to do so.
Not because I was attached to this character. No.
Because he was my best mason and stone is arguably the hardest resource to gain.
I was thinking purely about crunching the numbers, and as a gamer who is usually extremely character-driven and story-driven, I was disappointed by this.
If you are expecting a building simulator with a light matchmaking flavour, you might enjoy Lakeburg Legacies.
If you were hoping for a game where you could grow the story of family lineages and create an attachment to the individual characters, as one does with their families in The Sims, then this game will not provide you with that experience.