I should have been enjoying the beach. I was on vacation, far from my gaming PC, and close to soothing, rolling waves. But instead, my mind kept drifting to a landlocked chunk of 14th century Germany. Few games have wormed their way into my brain like Manor Lords.
The medieval “city builder with battles,” as the developer Slavic Magic describes it, is intricate and challenging, with lots of moving pieces and interdependencies. It’s also, at times, immensely frustrating. There’s a satisfaction to that, like a multi-step puzzle box — you suss out countless tiny solutions until they all build up to the satisfying click that finally opens the lid.
But I think what’s gotten to me most about Manor Lords is not the complexity, the attention to detail, or even that satisfaction you get from planning out a city and watching it thrive. I think it’s Greg.
Manor Lords is a passion project. Greg Styczeń, who goes by Slavic Magic, has been working on its design for seven years. And there’s something funny about the entire dev team behind a successful game consisting of just this one dude named Greg.
But it’s not that you see Greg’s hand in every pixel — there are no in-jokes or easter eggs, and even the graphics are based on historically accurate scans rather than showing some individual style. Instead, the passion part of the project can be found in how the game works.
Manor Lords’ villages and towns bustle. There’s always activity. People and livestock cart goods between buildings, structures get built from the ground up while you watch the progress, vendors call from the marketplace, and farmland gets plowed, sowed, and reaped depending on the season. And you can just watch it all happen, either zoomed out and watching from above like some, well, lord, or zoomed way down to ground level, following the folks (or sheep) around on their daily tasks.
And Greg did all that.
Stardew Valley has a similar story — developed by a single person over four years, it has gone on to sell
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