Sometimes it’s nice when city-builders look like stratospheric views of actual cities, and sometimes it’s nicer when they look like a collection of animated postage stamps. Behold Dawnfolk – a pixelart fantasy town grower packed full of minigames that describes itself as “charmingly dark and minimalist”, much like a potential hook-up on some highbrow dating service.
The premise is that you’re running a tile-based kingdom lost to malevolent shadows. Fortunately, you’ve got a fireball friend called Lueur who can light up tiles for you, providing you keep it topped up by producing glowdust. Upon these liberated tiles you shall grow crops, breed animals and build things like taverns, temples and sawmills. It’s all very trim and tidy, as I’ve just learned from the Steam demo – perhaps a bit too trim and tidy. Here’s a trailer.
“Not everyone has time to invest hundreds of hours into learning how to play a grand strategy game,” comments the Steam page. Oh my word! “You can dive right in and start building your settlement immediately, going from a handful of tents to a big city in less than an hour,” it continues. Stop! Stop! My mouth can only produce so much drool!
The price of such convenience, naturally, is that this isn’t massively elaborate by city-builder standards. It feels like more of a strategy puzzle boardgame, with adjacency bonuses shaping your choice of buildings in addition to the need for certain resources.
Still, there’s a pleasant liveliness to this murky world. Tiles burble with marketplace chatter, animal noises, and the like. There’s also a military component, with Orc camps to flatten, and irregular battles with the aforesaid malevolent shadows. This takes the form of a minigame, nested within the tile at stake, where you angle a sword towards threats.
I can live without a lot of Dawnfolk’s minigames. While the idea of a Warioware company town is fun, the ones I’ve sampled were rather perfunctory and unimaginative – sliding a bow and arrow around to shoot deer for a few seconds when harvesting meat, for example. Still, Dawnfolk has the makings of a sweet diversion between rounds of Farthest Frontier. It’s out now and the demo is still live on Steam.