The Wandering Village puts a city-building sim on a Miyazaki-like creature

polygon.com:

Village-building sims often open in a familiar way: They task you with gathering resources to craft and build structures. This is why I told my villagers to harvest Onbu’s spike, which yielded 30 stones. It seemed like a smart decision at the time, except for the tiny fact that I hadn’t read the fine print, and thus hadn’t realized it would make Onbu trust me less. We were off to a rocky start.

In The Wandering Village, you have to build a town that can survive the end of the world. Groups of nomads attempt to weather a ravaged Earth with toxic environments that can no longer sustain life. Your new home is on Onbu, a Hayao Miyazaki-esque, primordial creature that happens to have a large, habitable space on its back. As Onbu traverses the game’s world, you must adapt the village to environmental challenges while supporting a growing number of survivors. The game, which is now in Steam Early Access on Windows PC, Mac, and Linux, feels surprisingly polished — though it has some clear space to grow.

Onbu is nearly always on the move. As it trundles, it brings the village on its back through various biomes that affect farming and land toxicity. Deserts decrease water production and cold, mountainous regions slow crop growth. Toxic air pockets cause Onbu’s land to rot, killing plant life. It feels a lot like Timberborn or Don’t Starve, in which seasonal changes require players to adapt in order to survive. But in The Wandering Village, challenges don’t come at a regular seasonal clip. Instead, players can see where Onbu is headed via an overworld map, and attempt to issue commands to the lumbering creature. It adds another strategic layer that necessitates planning on an additional plane, not unlike XCOM 2 or Wildermyth.

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