Banished: An Unforgiving Experience

I was flicking through Steam today, checking out what sales are going on at the moment, and a game popped up that seems pretty cool. It's called Farthest Frontier, and it's a town simulator-style game, which I've always enjoyed.

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First/ Third Person Shooters are great, as are RPGs, but a good town-builder game is nice for a chilled-out change of pace where you can craft something and watch it slowly grow and develop as it goes from a tiny settlement to a huge city with multiple moving parts.

It's nice to micro-manage all the elements that go into something like that, like making sure you're harvesting enough food to feed the population and let it grow. It reminds me of another game that I've never spoken about before but it's one I really like.

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Banished

This is such a cool game and concept as far as city builders go. Before playing this my only experience with city builder games was the likes of Tropico, Cities Skylines, or Sim City - waaay back in the day.

Banished takes all of the ideas of city builders and includes some seriously tough elements that cause a game over that has a lot of weight to it.

Tropico - is the sort of game that fizzles out based on geo-politics and miss managing funds.

Cities Skylines - is the sort of game that leaves you with an empty city, after you've become bankrupted.

Sim City - is the sort of game that does the above, but also adds the ability to destroy your own creation, meaning that you'll end your game by getting bored and releasing hell on your citizens.

Banished - is smaller in scope, based on the time period it's set in, and it's small in scale too - because every game starts off with only a few families of people.

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Gameplay

In Banished, you start out your city with nothing but a handful of people who need your guidance. They've got some supplies and food, and since it's spring you have some time to get established before your first winter.

Usually, the best course of action is to build a barn to store your food, then clear a plot to store materials, and then set up a few houses for shelter.

Once that's done, it's time to start planning other structures, such as fishing posts, forestry houses, firewood choppers, and potentially a few farms.

You need to assign all these people jobs and make the most of them, but you have to be careful. Too many builders mean you can't have food gatherers, and too many food gatherers mean you're neglecting your construction jobs. Obviously, it's more in-depth than just that, there are tons of jobs, and all are important, but at the start, buildings, food, and firewood are the top priority.

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Winter Is Coming

By the time winter rolls around, gathering is tough, and farming is impossible, which leaves fishing as the only option for food. If you haven't stockpiled enough, deaths will occur. Sometimes not just from starvation, but from the cold as well.

For example, if you mark some trees to be cut down, but they're too far from your town, the people will freeze, especially if they're not wearing adequate clothing, but to make clothing you need cotton and sheep, which are usually hard to come by.

Winter is the time in the game that you need to prepare for, and it really gets intense, especially as you get to the end. As soon as it's over, you're desperately trying to get the farms up and running, and doing all you can to expand/ horde resources.

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Expansion: The Second Hurdle

Food, isn't the only issue, however, and you may spend your entire time focusing on it only to realise that this game has a few more tricks up its sleeve.

If you aren't building homes, you'll soon realise that you have a whole population of people living with their parents until the age of 20 to 30, sometimes even as late as 40 if left neglected.

Once people in Banished go past 30 it's hard for them to give birth, and that's a huge issue, because with this fact comes the issue of a declining population. I've had a few games where I physically didn't have enough workers to keep the town growing, and the people fed.

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Mass Death

The game is incredibly unforgiving, and usually a wrong move or bad decision results in the majority, if not all of your people dying out.

It's tough to come back from 50% or more of your people dying, and even in the late game, you'll find that a run of bad luck or a bad decision, or neglect for that matter can result in a healthy and thriving town to become a literal ghost town in the space of minutes.

Banished is an amazing challenge and really keeps you immersed in this world. Also, when you are hit with some problems, you never blame the game, instead, you blame yourself for not being prepared. Nothing ever feels like it's the game's fault, and I think for a game of this style to keep the pressure on the player is a great achievement.

The guilt that comes from a town that you invested so much time into being wiped out is indescribable. It really leaves you in a slight state of mourning, thinking back on your strategy and wondering, "What if?"

It goes without saying that once you lose your last citizen, it's game over. You can reload of course, but I kind of see that as cheating to a certain extent.

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I know I didn't talk about Farthest Frontier, but based on what I read about the game, it reminded me of this little gem.

My hard drive is completely full on both my laptop, and pc so I can't even install the game to have a go of it, but writing about it here has scratched the itch to play it a bit.

I'll be buying some new external hard drives soon, so I'm looking forward to that so I can reclaim my storage space.