The Wandering Village Review (eekz)
In The Wandering Village (EA Build 0.10.6), you adapt to changing biomes while building a settlement on the back of a giant walking rock monster. It's a little Ghibli-esque, generally relaxing, and simple enough to learn; I'm having enough fun with it so far to recommend it.
What Works For Me
✅ The anime-style character and building art is reminiscent of old-school Ghibli. Also, Onbu is adorable.
✅ You can form a mutualistic symbiotic relationship with Onbu by studying it, directing it, catapulting mushrooms into its mouth (which is adorable), and healing it; or, if you're a sociopath, you can chop off its horns and whip it. Your actions affect Onbu's trust in you, which affects its behavior: if it trusts you, it wags its tail and roams around with head held high like a good rock-dog; but if it doesn't, you deserve what you get.
✅ You can zoom all the way in to spy on your villagers or all the way out to the board-game-like map using only your mouse scroll wheel.
✅ When you come to a fork in the road, Onbu gives you a moment to choose (by zooming out to the map and clicking the path you want) before forging ahead; different paths have different "road events" that can yield supplies or new nomads. You can also dispatch scavengers to collect rare items from nearby map locations.
✅ Onbu wanders into different biomes with varying air toxicity, temperature, and humidity. Poisonous air makes your villagers and Onbu sick; temperature affects which crops can grow; and humidity impacts how much water you can harvest. This is a really cool mechanic.
✅ Long research trees!
✅ While relatively slow-paced and chill on regular speed, 3X speed is pretty good for management junkies. I was bored even at 3X speed in Flotsam, but it feels like there's always more to do here.
What Doesn’t Work For Me
❎ If there's a way to play the campaign without the tutorial, I haven't figured it out yet. The tutorial is seemingly endless and always sitting on the side of your screen, telling you what to do next, and just - shut up, game, I do what I want.
❎The UI is… not great. Villager happiness metrics look more complicated than they are, and the constant red indicators when your air wells stop working or your villagers go on temporary hunger-strikes are more disruptive than helpful.
❎I hate the storage system. The different workstations have internal storage, and overflow materials can be stored in chests; but instead of a general capacity, chests holds (75) of each resource. This means that if you have (400) wood logs, the chest next to your chopping area holds (75) logs and (75) clay and (75) whatever, and the rest of your wood piles will be scattered across Onbu's back until someone eventually relocates them to another chest.
❎Villager AI is not smart. My nomads were tired of eating raw berries and beets, so I installed a kitchen and churned out enough berry museli to feed an army. Happiness increased but villagers started to starve; instead of going to the kitchen or the pantries for some museli, they insist on walking by these buildings to eat berries off the bush.
❎ Dirt roads can only be placed orthogonally, and the 2D buildings can't be rotated; the end result looks a little awkward on Onbu's more 3D back.
Final Thoughts
So far, Wandering Village feels like a chill cozy game with just enough depth to be interesting over time. I particularly like that certain crops only grow in certain climates, and that you can relocate resources like berry bushes to designated areas. I also cannot state enough how much I love Onbu.
That said, I'm growing increasingly irritated with the UI, villagers refusing to eat prepared food, the storage system, and how the town looks. It has more content than Flotsam by far, but I love planning logistics and supply chains, and that's just not possible here.
Recommendation
I would recommend this to Ghibli fans, cozy gamers, and anyone else who read Discworld so long ago that you only remember the elephants and turtle. If you want to bond with a big old rock dog while building and evolving a settlement in a poisonous world, you're going to have fun.
If you were more interested in the mechanics of building a civilization on a moving platform than you are in loving the best boi ever, then Airbone Empire might be the perfect fit for you. Alternatively, if you just want to build something pretty in a mostly-relaxed environment (with some supply chain management), I personally love Fabledeom.
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