Banished

Clicker/resource management games got me hankering to go back and finally figure out how to play this game, which IIRC mrkgnao donated to me some big GoG sale of yore.

While the mechanics, on the surface, seem simple, they're fairly complicated. The tutorial will give you the basics, but you're likely going to mess up tremendously for your first 5-10-umpteen maps because it's pretty short, and really doesn't explain the things that are likely to confound you for hours.

I definitely still haven't mastered the game by any stretch of the imagination - some of that I blame on the controls/UI not being entirely intuitive.

For example, how to get citizens to change jobs? If I make this pen 10x9 how many animals can I raise in that space? How about 12x8? 40x6? How many workers does an orchard take?

This sort of ambiguity does, to an extent, invite experimentation, but without spamming save/load games, it's not actually very functional. There's no way to tell what some of these things will do without either trying them, or pausing the game and going online to see what theorycraft is out there about the ideal size and staffing for a farm or orchard.

I found a comment thread where someone put it quite eloquently - Banished is not a "game" as much as it is a "toy." While it does follow some internal logic, there's no particular goal, and if you're going to find joy in it, it's going to come from your own imagination and trying to make it do what you want - and occasionally, failing and trying to figure out why.

That said, I still think the game could benefit from a bit more information. In one game I somehow apparently split up a couple into different houses early in the game. There was no notification that they'd divorced, or anything. Just a weird highlight then a boop and mom had moved out. And for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get her to move out.

On the whole, there is much to like about it - it's a pretty well designed sandbox game on the whole, and the art is nice, and some of the maps are blazingly hard, even on easier settings. Having to spend earlier resources on bridges, and perhaps more importantly the construction time and the longer commutes back and forth for warmth and food and etc., really raise the degree of challenge.

I suspect it's a game I'll come back to repeatedly. Mostly it just made me want to play a city builder that is a bit more on the 'game' side of the ledger, but still, I enjoyed the additional 10-12 hours I put into it this time becoming less of a total noob and almost semi-competent. You do learn something in this game from (nearly) every failure.