Apple Arcade - Outlanders (2019) [+]
Aug 15 2022
Outlanders is a village-building game set on an island. You have people (adults and kids) which you assign to tasks (just the adults, kids grow up to become working adults and old adults die). Gather resources, make building, produce items that help you do the next cycle of resources, building, production.
Meanwhile you have to balance the society: keeping people happy (employed, fed, not overworked). Buildings accommodate one to three (usually two) workers and idle works are unhappy (so sometimes I leave buildings around even though no useful work to do because all nearby resources exploited). Meanwhile everyone eats one unit a day and in general they like variety (you can live on mushrooms but it's not a happy time). People going hungry are unhappy and eventually starve.
Happy people make more children and everybody needs to be housed (not having a home is unhappiness). Those children need to be fed and when they grow up in a few days they need to work (aging cycle is greatly sped up otherwise it doesn't make sense in a level that runs for two or three months). Keep your population from exploding beyond your ability to feed, house and employ.
The levels have a variety of objectives. In one your group is shipwrecked, starting with nothing, and have 40 days to survive and build a boat. In another a storm has devastated a big village now you have a bunch of hungry people and need to concentrate on survival. The third or fourth level you are a small religious group building a huge statue -- you have plenty of time but have to keep the population at a dozen or less (in the end, you can go over and some people will die of old age but it's uncertain).
Graphics are simple with a painterly style so it doesn't have much details. You can pan, rotate, zoom to look around (which can get a bit annoying). You can pause the game and still allocate people to buildings, or speed it up to x5 (only) and night time goes at x5 with everybody going to sleep. You can sit back and watch the people moving about working which gives you zen moments but soon you need to get back to managing people.
Overall it's a really nice village building game and the levels are fairly challenging (I usually fail the first time but it's a learning experience, for example my people starved because farms, though they create lots of food, do it at the end of a multi-day cycle and you can starve in between cycles unless you have multiple farms or a great secondary food source).
Meanwhile you have to balance the society: keeping people happy (employed, fed, not overworked). Buildings accommodate one to three (usually two) workers and idle works are unhappy (so sometimes I leave buildings around even though no useful work to do because all nearby resources exploited). Meanwhile everyone eats one unit a day and in general they like variety (you can live on mushrooms but it's not a happy time). People going hungry are unhappy and eventually starve.
Happy people make more children and everybody needs to be housed (not having a home is unhappiness). Those children need to be fed and when they grow up in a few days they need to work (aging cycle is greatly sped up otherwise it doesn't make sense in a level that runs for two or three months). Keep your population from exploding beyond your ability to feed, house and employ.
The levels have a variety of objectives. In one your group is shipwrecked, starting with nothing, and have 40 days to survive and build a boat. In another a storm has devastated a big village now you have a bunch of hungry people and need to concentrate on survival. The third or fourth level you are a small religious group building a huge statue -- you have plenty of time but have to keep the population at a dozen or less (in the end, you can go over and some people will die of old age but it's uncertain).
Graphics are simple with a painterly style so it doesn't have much details. You can pan, rotate, zoom to look around (which can get a bit annoying). You can pause the game and still allocate people to buildings, or speed it up to x5 (only) and night time goes at x5 with everybody going to sleep. You can sit back and watch the people moving about working which gives you zen moments but soon you need to get back to managing people.
Overall it's a really nice village building game and the levels are fairly challenging (I usually fail the first time but it's a learning experience, for example my people starved because farms, though they create lots of food, do it at the end of a multi-day cycle and you can starve in between cycles unless you have multiple farms or a great secondary food source).