Banished

The hardest part of this game is the first half hour or so, getting through that first winter. If you can manage that, you can generally breeze through everything else, just building your town up and out, collecting every kind of farm/orchard seed. I enjoy casually expanding into every nook and cranny available on the map. But that's also the problem: A few hours into the game and you've seen everything there is to see. There's just nothing more to do other than keep growing the same way you've been. The population is automatically locked to the available housing, so it very easily settles into a steady state that really doesn't require any attention. This limits the replayability.

Banished is a game I own on both Steam and GOG for the reason of "I never double check" so the 20~ hours I've spent trying to keep my settlers from dying of the sniffles hasn't translated. But I can tell you this, Banished is a simple city builder that lets you do more than the bare neccessities. The only issue is it doesn't go much farther than that. You control a small gaggle of goons out in the middle of nowhere with a barn and a hope to survive, so you set up building sites and manage jobs hoping they stay alive long enough to not die when winter comes. And the game gives you that basic premise, a set of tools and then goes home to do nothing. It's not a bad game and it's an effective time waster for other downloads but there's nothing to stock to you. Building stuff is simple, the UI is simple, graphics are simple, the only thing I take issue with is the AI but that's mostly because they take just a little too long to get focused on stuff so when your farmer dies of pneumonia, it'll take a day or so for the new farmer to get to the field and hopefully save your potatoes from rotting. I think 20 bucks is overkill for a game like this but 9/10 it drops to 5 in sales and for 5 bucks, it's not too bad.

I have spent over 200 hours on this game and I still go back to it every now and then. If you like sandbox style games where you can focus on building, trying different town layouts without having to worry about disasters and micromanaging townspeople then this game is for you. The music is relaxing, even if it is somewhat repetitive, and the start can be tricky especially in hard mode. Once you get going however it's mostly smooth sailing. I'm giving a 4 star rating because it's 2021 and this game could do with a few quality of life improvements.

Banished is a village-builder where you place buildings to build, define which resources to harvest, and assign workers to occupations, but have no direct control of the inhabitants. This can be both a good and a bad thing. The citizens will proceed to do the tasks related to their assigned jobs, except when they don't. In most cases, they will take care of personal needs (bringing food, firewood, tools, clothing, and medicine home from storage, etc.), but may occasionally fail spectacularly and die of starvation, freezing, or illness with the solution to their problem lying only a few steps away for months. Then your fishing-person will fall in the river and drown. The only serious down side is that there is no "end goal" of any sort, just increasing tedium as you exhaust the resources close at hand, then several mines and quarries (which cannot be removed once exhausted), and then you have trouble transporting enough raw materials to the center of the map from the increasingly distant resources remaining. There are no "enemies", no hostile creatures, and no deadlines to meet, so it's purely a "build at your own pace until you get bored with it" game.

It's so nice to play a 'City Building' game without be attacked by enemies every ten minutes. I feel like I'm actually building up a village instead of fighting armies. This is the way such a game should have been made all along. (I have disasters on so I know bad things will eventually happen--but that's my choice. No more bullies coming over the hill and kicking my walls down.)