Farthest Frontier: The Final Preview

ign.com:

Farthest Frontier is far from the first foray I've fared into the fir-flecked forests of an unforgiving land. But as survival city-builders go, it provides some targeted depth and realism in areas that often get ignored. While I ran out of things to hold my interest in games like Banished fairly quickly, the agriculture and food spoilage system here make running and developing a settlement much more engaging.

The premise is fairly simple. You get dumped in the woods with a few medieval settlers and have to survive harsh weather, disease, starvation, wolves, bears, and eventually – though I didn't run into any, thankfully – bandit attacks. Providing housing, firewood, fish, and berries is the first priority. But as your population grows, your town center levels up, and the tech tree is slowly unlocked, things get more complicated.

The most significant wrinkle here is the very detailed food spoilage system. If you were planning to rely on the rations you brought with you to survive the first winter… I have bad news for you. They're mostly going to rot faster than your villagers can eat them. Getting food is only half the battle, because you can make a giant pile of fish and berries in the warm summer months and it will all be inedible mush by the middle of winter. Thus the tech tree is just as much about developing ways to store and preserve food as it is about getting more of it.

Even for your tiny starting population, survival just by hunting, fishing, and foraging is a harsh life on the razor's edge of starvation. You'll have to develop agriculture to sustain anything much larger or have any wiggle room at all, and that's where one of the most interesting systems in Farthest Frontier kicks in. In addition to having to find