Mountainous town-builder Laysara: Summit Kingdom has received a Sandbox update that, essentially, turns a game about settling the slopes of precisely one mountain into a lightweight trading empire simulator. Where the early access game’s existing modes have you doing up one Bonsai Everest at a time, Sandbox lets you switch between several and export goods for other alpine mayors to buy.
It’s a significant addition to an early access project that had our Nic Reuben in fits of ecstasy, smashing his Grinchy heart asunder to reveal the wholesome yak fanboi lurking within. “Possibly the prettiest city builder I’ve ever seen,” he declared back at the game’s early access launch, like a judge at a yak contest waving around a yak-hair bagful of yak-hair rosettes. Nic is away this week, so I am reasonably safe from repercussions over painting him as a smelly weirdo yak enthusiast. That said, I might ban him from the comments in advance, just to be safe.
I played a bit of Laysara: Summit Kingdom’s demo last year myself, and yeah, it’s good, though its fantasy world seems heavily informed by caricatures about Himalayan communities and Tibetan monasteries. Its town construction is shaped by elevation, with different kinds of vegetation and other resources and perils at higher altitudes. There’s the omni-present risk of avalanches, but you can fortify your towns and plant forests to redirect the vengeful ice.
I never did a lot of it in the demo, but I do like this subliminal “avalanche sculpting sim” element. It makes me wonder if Polish developers Quite OK Games harbour any systemic aspirations of the “get lava computers working inside Dwarf Fortress” variety.
As detailed on Steam, Sandbox Mode adds a World Map for switching between towns. You’ll have a few unlocked to begin with, expanding your empire of peakvilles by raising temples on summits. Building temples also increases your research level across your entire empire. “Six new mountains!” the Steam changelog adds, like somebody forgetting the lyrics for The Twelve Days of Christmas. If they’d put that in a footnote I could have made a joke about foothills.
The changelog includes various smaller tweaks. They’ve added the option to construct ice altars during Free Build on certain maps, “a more detailed UI research panel, showing where does research comes from”, and “more precise cursor detection when clicking on Advanced Yak Breeding”. Got to be surgical, when match-making yaks.
The developers comment in the post that Sandbox Mode is about “expanding your kingdom in whatever way you see fit” with only “a few tiny story bits and a single global objective to provide a general sense of purpose”. That said, it’s also a taste of their plans for the game’s forthcoming campaign, which will be “a more ‘directed’ sandbox experience with more detailed objectives (similar to what you’ve seen in the Scenarios)”. The campaign will arrive with the game’s 1.0 release later this year.