Most city builders pit man against nature. To lay down your own roots, you have to rip up the plant life and usurp entire habitats in order to facilitate another. This week’s Indie Spotlight is all about The Wandering Village, a game where you settle on the back of a giant, roaming creature and decide between symbiosis and parasitism.
Toxic spores are spreading across the land, forcing your villagers on a pilgrimage to find sanctuary. They soon come across an ancient creature thought long extinct - an Onbu. It’s sort of like a Brachiosaurus. Its back is a huge slab of forest and earth, the perfect wandering village. You clamber up and pitch your tents while Onbu slowly waddles off, taking you to new lands.
The first hour or so of gameplay is like any other city builder. Make some accommodation, get food production up and running, gather basic resources, etc. But then I notice a crossroad on the map. One way leads to a group of nomads who could join the village, and the other leads to a cloud of poison spores. Time to build a giant horn and tell Onbu I wanna avoid the death cloud. How do I know what horn calls work? I have no idea, I don’t speak Onbu. but my villagers do, apparently.
Anyway, Onbu decides to ignore me because it doesn’t know me from Adam. Why on earth would it listen to me? My villagers are like fleas to the thing. I need to build up trust with it. It’s a somewhat hidden mechanic, but feeding animals always makes them friendly, so it’s time to build a feeding trebuchet. A few mouthfuls of grub later and it’s willing to go where I want.
Here’s where the decision between symbiosis or parasitism comes into play. Onbu will go through various biomes, each with their own boons and obstacles. If it goes through a desert, my air wells stop working. If my water reserves are used up I then can’t plant any more food. I can send out expeditions to gather water from any oases I come across, but these are few and far between. I can try to gather berries, but if these run out, I can drill into the creature’s back to collect its blood with each heartbeat. Yeah, bet you weren’t expecting that turn were you?
It’s not hard to keep a small village sustained, even through drought and famine, but to survive I need to expand, and that means my margin for error gets smaller. Pretty soon I have to decide between letting villagers go hungry or hurting dear, sweet, innocent Onbu. I can research various technologies that involve drilling into it and extracting various bodily fluids and leavings for my own benefit, but they all cause Onbu considerable pain and make me feel like a monster.
The Wandering Village forces you to strike a delicate balance. Do you accept that sometimes you’ll have to go without or do you harm the very thing keeping you alive? Do you squirrel rations away for the future and expand at a sustainable rate, or do you bet it all on red and drill down into poor Onbu when you go bust and times get tough?
Maybe if Earth was a cute dinosaur that could yawn and waddle along we’d look after it more. We’d probably still drill down through its flesh and sinew and pump its lifeforce for all it was worth, though.
A demo for The Wandering Village is available to play now, for free, on Steam.