Banished to Windows

Banished is a city-building simulation of a medieval settlement with elements of survival. The project was developed by the one-man indie studio Shining Rock Software, consisting of Luke Hodorowicz, and was released in 2014 for Windows.

The setting and plot

The village is set in a notional unnamed medieval world. The player commands a group of settlers who have arrived in an unoccupied wilderness to establish a settlement. Beginning with no more than ten families, the small village has to grow into an entire city of hundreds of people.

As such, there is no plot, a typical town-planning simulator was given a traditionally free style of development. However, the game has a system of events generation, good and bad, which allows you to write your own story of each settlement, from time to time creating a unique final story.

Gameplay and Content

The main task of the player, as mentioned earlier, is to ensure the survival of his subordinates and build a huge city with all the benefits of medieval civilization. The single most important resource of the settlement - people. Competently distributing duties among the villagers, the player must provide a stable flow of water, food, clothing, tools and building resources. In all of the above is also needed and an overabundance, as you need to constantly evolve.

Complicates the situation worked out the change of seasons, to which before life was tightly bound. In the spring you need to plant fields with seeds, in summer you need to prepare raw materials, in the fall, before the first snow, the harvest needs to be harvested, and in winter you should be busy creating handicrafts, sitting by a warm fireplace. And there may well not be enough hands for all tasks, so you have to regularly switch your workers between the most important occupations at a particular period.

Having coped with the initial flow of logistical problems of the young village, the player is waiting for a measured multi-year development with new and new problems due to both emerging resource shortages on the map, and the emergence of the needs of the inhabitants of the growing village. And even the absence of external threats does not ease the situation, whether people will survive another winter.

Graphics and Sound

The visuals do not grab the stars from the sky, rather simple and pleasant. The picture does not cut the eye, everything looks pretty nice and cozy. The only thing missing is more detail in Banished. The sound in the game is also designed well and at first it's nice to listen to the surroundings and country noises. In time, unfortunately, because of the small variety of soundtracks, they start to get boring and annoying, but not every player will sit through Banished until that point.