Banished

I avidly followed the blogs while this game was in development and I am thrilled with the final product. Game is so much fun, who needs combat when you are battling Mother Nature herself!

Was addictive before, but now with mods....its too much!

This is a game that plays very much like a base-building RTS without any fighting. Why would this be fun? Wouldn't the most tedious part of some RTS's without the rest be boring? Sort of, this game reminds me of 'This War of Mine' in motivation; less fun, more captivating. When you see that 'Your supply of food is low!' and the NPCs just finished harvesting or winter is almost there, you get kind of wide-eyed and scared. If your food /does/ run out and people start dieing, the game shines, as most of it is fairly scalable, as in you can take away some traders/miners etc. and move them to growing crops/hunting and/or shutdown some facilities and wait for everything to slowly grow back. Emphasis should be put on 'slowly' in that last sentence, if a lot of people die, children are the first to go, and it takes a while for people to grow up. Unlike most RTS's emphasis is less on resources/build times and more on people and how much they can work/how many jobs are filled. That may seem weird but it'll make sense when you play. Making sense, however, is not one of the game's strong points, theres no tutorial and very little explanation of whats needed to get a town going, after a couple of failed maps I figured out what to do but that could be a big turn off. Theres a lot of little nuances to how this game works that'll take time to learn. Overall I'd give it a 4.6/5 its entertaining, after I bought it I played it for 6 hours straight! Be prepared for some slow periods and a steep learning curve, however.

Imo this is the best city-building I have ever played, from the challenging city management, to the sweet, citizens working animations, that is just addicting to watch. And to say everything in this game was made by one sole dev!

I bought this game over on Steam when it first came out. I've come back to it time and again. It is a small, comforting game. I play it wearing my 3D goggles, and it is like staring dreamily into an aquarium; small creatures floating about living their lives in calm resilience to the weather around them. There are some small tricks to learn -- what size to build the crop fields, where to place forests, and other aspects of the economic model, but this is not a deep strategy game. This is relaxing fun.