How Bellwright Early Access will let you live out a medieval uprising fantasy

thesixthaxis.com:

There’s a great deal of romance attached to leading a medieval revolution against an oppressive regime, thanks in no small part to the myths surrounding Robin Hood and his Merry Men. The reality would have been much colder, darker and damp, but Bellwright is a game that latches onto that idealised fantasy and runs with it, tasking you with liberating the lands and building an army strong enough to stand against the Crown.

Heading into Steam Early Access later this month on 23rd April, Bellwright is an impressively broad game that’s sure to appeal to an awful lot of PC gamers out there.

In essence, you can boil Bellwright down to being a blend of a survival game with strategy layered on top, but this certainly looks to be a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The early game will naturally focus on gathering, hunting, building and crafting, but alongside establishing your starting camp, you’ll also be recruiting NPCs to join you and your cause. That’s really where this game will stand out compared to the bulk of the Survival genre, and getting a preview of a mid-game Bellwright save showed us just how far these settlements can go. Sure, you’ll be liberating villages across the land, but your base camps can easily be the size of villages in their own right!

Within that comes the strategic and management side of the game. To a large extent, you can leave a base to manage itself and NPCs will automatically handle jobs like farming or any construction and crafting tasks you set, but you can also go hands-on and start to micromanage things and fiddle with overall town management with a priority system. All of these jobs have a physical element to them, with NPCs having to physically go and fell trees and bring them back to make buildings, or go through the process of getting seeds from storage, plant them, ensure they’re watered and eventually harvest the crops.

Of course, as you look to foment rebellion, you’ll also need to bear arms. As your settlements grow,