Talking survival city builders with Stray Fawn Studios and Team Kerzoven

destructoid.com:

While SimCity happened way back in 1989, the city builder genre is in a sort of renaissance. Sure, Cities: Skylines continues its stranglehold on municipal simulation, but a sub-genre has sprung up in its shadow; the survival city builder (sometimes just known as settlement-builders). While this genre has technically been around for decades, it only started finding its identity in the wake of 2014’s Banished. Since then, a number of games like Settlement Survival have picked up the ball where it was left, and other games like Frostpunk have taken the concept in different directions.

Management games, in general, and city builders as a whole are big relaxation games for me. While games that require a hyper-focused state, such as Doom Eternal, help me manage my anxiety, it’s city builders that help me unwind.

The genre shows no sign of letting up, with games like Stray Fawn Studios’ The Wandering Village and Team Kerzoven’s Circle of Kerzoven on the horizon with differing approaches. Both games are from Switzerland and under the SwissGames umbrella, which gave me the opportunity to talk to both of them.

Circle of Kerzoven is the most closely adjacent to Banished of the two projects. The big difference is that the environment is simulated within it. Not only do you manage the needs of your settlers, but you also must balance their needs against the resources available. Not respecting nature can cause animals to go extinct or even “explosively multiply.”

“When Banished was released, I was extremely impressed by the consistent simulation of the villagers,” described Marco Burri, founder of Team Kerzoven and Lead Developer on Circle of Kerzoven. “You could observe the life of each person, which was unique at that time.