Years 1-4 of the game may be quite intense as you learn the game (Your people seem to randomly starve or wander off into a blizzard, or you realize too late that you've used up all the stone with no hope of obtaining more). However, as you become familiar, the difficulty curve drops significantly and it becomes more of a relaxed village-builder with resource management. The base game isn't terribly deep and the only real goal is to keep the village alive and growing, but it's pleasant, nice to look at and has calm music.
(This review breaks the rules to review exclusively the in-game experience. Remove it if you must) To give the developers the benefit of the doubt, they may have had good intentions. However, this game is in incredibly poor taste at the moment given the worldwide effects of this pandemic and the number of people who have lost loved ones to the virus, their livelihoods and/or many personal freedoms. Perhaps there will be a place for this game in the same category of other games that explore dark periods in the world's history, but right now it is too fresh and too immediate. While I do not think this game is fundamentally any ethically worse than other games that promote lifelike violence or discuss the spread of disease, the choice of timing and title at best demonstrates an alarming insensitivity. I very rarely post reviews for games, but I was upset enough to see GOG promoting this one that I am doing so.
