T w e n t y S i d e d

This weekend Virtual Villagers caught my eye. I remembered The Rampant Coyote mentioning this game back in August, and so I grabbed it more or less on impulse.

The tech ladder. My one quibble: FISHING is more advanced than FARMING?!? That is very, very backwards, particularly for island natives.

It’s an interesting game. I was expecting a sort of “Sim City on a micro scale”, but that isn’t what I got. This game is a lot like the “take care of your pet” games, a style that is common enough that there ought to be a genre name for it. You start off with a group of a half-dozen villagers and a few huts, and you must guide them into a flourishing community. There is no save / load system, where you could go back and correct an earlier mistake. The game just runs. If you exit the game and come back later, time will have passed in the game world.

I can see how these sorts of games are intended to be played: You’re supposed to check in on them periodically, and spend maybe five minutes playing every hour or so. I don’t usually care for this sort of thing myself, but it’s a popular game type and I can understand why some people find it appealing. It’s more nurturing than managerial, and more casual than in-depth. My problem is that after five minutes I want to keep playing but there really isn’t anything left to do.

There is a simple tech system, where you can research better ways of living to make larger populations possible. The first group of villagers start off in their early 20’s with little job knowledge. The more a person does a particular job the better they get, so it makes sense to specialize. Eventually they get old and die.

There are also a number of goals, or landmark events that you can reach, but you don’t know what they are ahead of time. This sounds annoying, but it’s actually pretty engaging. There are bits of the environment you don’t know what to do with, and goals which you know are there but don’t know what they are or how to reach them. I found myself experimenting with the environment, trying to get the villagers to examine different things and see how they might be used.

It’s an amusing game.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.