It's a city-builder. You're set in a non-specific pre-industrial uninhabited frontier to establish a town of your own making. Climate is unforgiving, terrain is hilariously difficult, people die easily to all manner of ills, and merely having enough food for the winter is the entire plot for the first 10 years of every town worth building. Crops and cemetaries. It's awesome. Money is non-existent. What little sporadic, and unreliable, trading that can be done is strictly bartering only. I could go on with all the things the authors have done right with this game. But it'll be quicker to get on with the couple of reasons it's not 5 stars. 1. There are few challenges beyond the achievements list. There are few terrain generation options and even fewer starting condition settings. There are no scenarios, or anything resembling a campaign. 2. The townsfolk are painfully stupid. If you run out of tools you may end up with a toolless blacksmith valiantly metal-working with his bare hands, and producing tools incredibly slowly. When he finally does make a single tool it's given to someone else and he goes right back to hitting hot metal with his hands. 3. Every person born desires to die a bachelor or spinster. The only reason people live together is because they physically have nowhere else to live. If you build a few extra houses beyond what your people currently need, they'll spread out into those houses, breaking up families to do so and thus stop breeding. Even a zero-year-old baby will live alone by choice if there are enough houses. This can also be triggered by a bad illness that kills more than a few percent of a decent sized town. The remaining pop will spread out into the empty houses. On multiple occasions I've had to demolish a bunch of houses to force couples back together in order to have a family. The tactic feels creepy and weird. Overall it's really good.
