The Wandering Village

Typically, city builders find fascination in the way layers of infrastructure depend on and support each other, in such a way that after a few hours playing Tropico or Cities: Skylines, you feel a sense of wonder that there’s water flowing readily from your taps when you pause for a bathroom break. Some of that’s true of The Wandering Village: there’s an inherent stress in juggling the constant and escalating needs of a growing population in an expanding settlement. But where usually the payoff in such games lies in observing a ruthlessly efficient road network or particularly cost-effective piece of sewage management, here it’s about imposing order upon a different kind of chaos not only the manmade kind, but the chaos of symbiosis, eking out existence on the back of a giant living being.

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It’s an original angle. According to the story, a global extinction event has shrouded much of the world in toxic gas and whittled humans or whatever species the denizens entrusted to your care may be - down to a few hardy survivors. Most of those who have survived have taken up residence atop a vast, quasi-magical creature called Onbu, which plods around a world map while you build logging camps and town squares along its indifferent spine. Success in The Wandering Village means balancing meeting the needs of the human population with meeting those of Onbu. Sometimes those needs are in sync: toxic air is bad for both, and should be avoided by diverting Onbu’s path on the map. Sometimes they’re not, such as when the beet harvest fails and you have only a few mushrooms to feed your people, and since they’re Onbu’s food source too, you force the poor creature into an intermittent fasting diet.