Manor Lords Review (Yarhor)
Still a lot of changes due to the game, but what's here is both already fun and incredibly promising.
This is a beautiful region-based building sim that asks you for different things at different times. Instead of the somewhat more typical building sim setup where you pick a place and then build stuff there and eventually get enough momentum that no threat or problem in the game will ever need active resolving, growing past that point in a single region instead opens you up to a new layer of the game, where you try to grow into new regions and integrate them all into a an overall economy.
The game does this while keeping the amount of moving parts both low enough to be easily comprehensible and with enough complexity and need of active management that you stay engaged. Two examples:
Foraged berries are a limited source of both early game food and a mid-late game input good for dyes, which are necessary to make cloth goods, which are in turn necessary upgrade your people's housing into higher, more efficient and more taxable tiers. So at some point in the game you need to judge whether you can remove this source of food, refigure your supply chain in a way that lets you make dyes efficiently, and maybe even set up an entire region who's only job is to supply you with dyes or berries, which they can then use to trade for either the bread or cloth your original region is producing. So, in the mid-late game, you're both making changes to your original settlement and setting up new settlements, but these new ones are not just a simple rehash of the same process you did with your original settlement because they have a relationship with the original settlement that needs to be actively managed. And you can't just dump all your surplus resources into the new place, either - they're different villages and don't care that much about each other, so anything you send out needs to take the form of a trade in some fashion.
And you get a lot of enjoyment out of the day to day building and management of things, too. Goods have locations, people have houses and needs, and all of these things need to get where they are going, so setting up things within a reasonable distance of each other can have huge effects. And you get to make a lot of small decisions, too. As the second example of good game design, houses can have upgrades and these upgrades can have both a huge impact and need careful consideration. For example, some houses can have vegetable fields, which can be a major source of additional food. But they also need a lot more space, and, crucially, the people in that household still need to work the fields, both to prepare them and for harvest, which then means that those households will have less time available for other duties at specific times of the year. So something that would be as simple as "plop some houses down" in a lot of other games needs a fair bit of consideration as to long-term consequences. At the same time, except for the hardest difficulty settings, if you *do* just want to plonk some houses down, you'll usually be able to find a way to make do with that without the game crumbling.
It's a game all about doing things with big soft impact rather than ones with small sharp impact.
The game is really cool and I'm more than happy just spending my time thinking about it when I'm not actively playing it. In this genre, there's no higher praise I can give than this.
Now... The promise of a lategame fully integrated multi-region economy is not fully there yet and seems like a complicated enough undertaking that it won't *ever* be there, in terms of both design (hard) and codebase (already a bit squeeky at the connecting bits). It's sweet af that the game is trying to go there at all and the overall quality of the game so far has given me more than enough trust to believe that if the game fails at this it won't be for lack of thought or effort.