Banished

Banished is a brilliant survival frontier town builder crafted by a lone indie developer. It’s a game of constant problem-solving where every solved crisis leads to the next challenge, and watching your settlement slowly grow feels incredibly rewarding. It makes you appreciate the comforts of modern life while pushing you to adapt and plan carefully. With excellent mod support and a friendly, dedicated community, Banished remains a gem for anyone who enjoys deep, thoughtful city-building with real stakes.

Challenging enough to always be interesting and so satisfying when you solve one crisis after another and see your little town grow. Focus on food +++ and firewood above everything else in the first year, then slowly expand. Trying to go too fast too far will destroy your town. Forest exploitation buildings are really good and will provide an endless (if slow) stream of wood. Also build some houses after a few years: people only move out of their parents' home and make children if they have their own house. Don't buy too many at once either. There's a balance to be kept if you want to keep your population growing, but not so fast you'll starve. No fighting in this game is so nice, wish more games did that. Just you and the unforgiving nature - which actually makes for a relaxing experience. Also the soundtrack is top notch.

I find most games in this genre reach a peak when everything becomes ok and the challenge of maintaining an expanding populace becomes hassle free. Not with Banished. It's a constant juggling act, trying to match the in flow of your resources to the people and their needs. Things can take a drastic turn for the worse when this equilibrium isn't met. It's a wonderful mixture of a village builder, city management and survival game. I love designing my little town and watching my people go about their business and managing, but the pressing issue of villager death keeps you on your toes. Buy this game :)

For me it's one of those strange games that manages to relax you in one way and stress you in another. It's a city builder where every single citizen matters and balancing production and labor is key to success.

Let me start off with the positive. I love this game. I've clocked 40+ hours in it and it has been an overall positive expierience. It's positively challaging and I would love to be able to reccomend it to you. But... It's let down by some bugs. Most notacibly a bug in wich removed roads can stay in this kind of "phantom state" in wich they are removed but you can't build over the tiles annymore. This, combined with the glaring lack of a way to modify the terain and limited open space, is game breaking in late-game. This is the reason that, at 40+ hours in, I'm shelving this game. And it makes me sad, becouse this could be an absolute gem. It is a challaging game, build a few to many houses and your population crashes becouse you have to many mouths to feed. You'll probably have to do some research to find out why a certain aproach is't working, but once you figure it out, it sure is worth it. Yet becouse of it's current state, I sadly can NOT reccomend you to buy this game. So, buyer bewarned!