Farthest Frontier Early Access Review

ign.com:

My medieval settlement in Farthest Frontier is suffering from drought and crop blight, everyone has smallpox, and we're being raided by bandits. It's… it's glorious. And I don't mean that purely in a masochistic way. I love a lot of difficult games, but what really sets this medieval colony builder apart is how its challenges all feel historical and authentic. And for a medieval history nerd like me, that really sells the experience – even when parts of it clearly necessitate the early access label.

Farthest Frontier drops you into one of four pleasant-seeming biomes with a dozen weary settlers looking to make a new life for themselves. The basics of building and running a settlement are simple enough, and fairly familiar if you've played other survival city-builders: gather wood, build houses, find food, and defend yourself from wolves and bears. The really interesting wrinkle here is that all food eventually spoils. Even the stockpile you start with won't last much beyond the first winter, meaning you can't just harvest everything in sight and not have to worry about it for a long time. At least, not at first.

This simple change is the core of why Farthest Frontier feels so authentic, and why I found its challenges so novel and satisfying. It forced me to think more like the way an actual medieval, agricultural society would think, eventually leading me down a lot of the same paths they traveled in real life. There are interesting trade-offs at every step of the way. Grain can be stored a lot longer than other crops, but it also can't be eaten on its own – you need to turn it into flour, and then bread, which requires two extra buildings. It also depletes soil fertility a lot faster than other crops.

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