Review: The Wandering Village (Switch)
By Our world is a volatile realm, laden with turmoil and financial uncertainty. Therefore, there’s always potential for yet another endearing city builder.
Swiss creator Stray Fawn Studio adheres to the established genre principles while providing a quaintly innovative thematic variation. The Wandering Village places you in the role of the caretaker of a small settlement, endeavoring to thrive atop a colossal entity that literally roams a post-apocalyptic barrenness.
Your selected Onbu (which roughly interprets to ‘piggyback ride’ in Japanese) wanders through the barren terrain while villagers hustle over its spine, forging a life and unraveling the enigmas of the environment surrounding them. Along the expedition, your settlement interacts with others scattered along the Onbu’s route.
Juggling the requirements of your villagers with the welfare of their gigantic companion is a captivating endeavor. At any moment, you can retract the camera to observe Onbu’s thunderous strides, and zooming out further unveils the broader biome it presently occupies.
For the most part, this represents a conventional management simulation, brimming with standard building types and a clear research tree. Yet subtle intricacies begin to surface once you modify your playstyle to align with the living, breathing land mass below your inhabitants’ feet. The mutually beneficial association between the inhabitants and their moving realm is where the game finds its distinct rhythm.
At the outset, Onbu wanders aimlessly, sporadically pausing to graze or curling up for a slumber. As you move forward, you’ll unlock tools to influence its actions and eventually steer its trajectory.
You must nourish Onbu, care for it when ill, and direct it using a giant horn. As the game unfolds, your array of tools expands. Unique synergistic abilities range from the benign (yes, you can affectionately stroke the large creature) to the disconcerting (sacrificing your own villagers for the creature’s advantage). An even darker facet of control surfaces, with abilities that discipline the beast and extract its vital fluids for your benefit. Will you take advantage of this peculiar animal that allows you to host festivities on its back, or will you strive to care for it? The decision is yours.
The rhythm of the central campaign is even, with a diminished sense of peril that makes for a largely soothing experience. The real challenge exists in overseeing staff throughout your expanding infrastructure. Each structure demands a specific quantity of workers, and while wanderers will sometimes join your community, enlarging your population, your workforce often remains constrained. You will frequently find yourself reallocating roles to meet whatever challenge arises next.
From time to time, Onbu may traverse treacherous regions that can endanger its health. It also requires regular feeding, making it crucial to monitor the map for nearby grazing areas to support its vitality. You might even construct a catapult to hurl food into its mouth.
The narrative is somewhat sparse, centering around the construction of a radio tower that intercepts transmissions from the greater world. Subsequently, your village elders endeavor to unveil the reasons behind the downfall of civilization, while nurturing relationships with other communities. Aside from a handful of stunning, Ghibli-inspired animated segments, most of the dialogue is confined to static text boxes.
The dimensions of Onbu’s back render the building area limited yet manageable. Nonetheless, things may become chaotic. In the late stages of the game, you’ll have a flurry of villagers darting around at 4x speed, constructing a bustling little metropolis. The Switch manages everything surprisingly well, although zooming in during fast-forwarding occasionally resulted in a slight judder on the older hardware. All control operates purely via the console, with no touchscreen features. Performance on Switch 2 seemed impeccable, with the larger display complementing the format beautifully while undocked.
While the main narrative is engaging enough, featuring several layers of difficulty to adjust your gameplay, there are also a couple of alternate modes designed to incite that just-one-more-go mentality.
Challenge Mode presents a collection of modifiers that alter the experience, shaping it to be as punishing or accommodating as you wish. There’s also a Sandbox Mode, which allows you to deactivate some of Onbu and villager penalties, granting you the liberty to breeze through an endless adventure. This level of accessibility is greatly valued and often absent in other games of this nature.
Overseeing an increasingly sprawling community on what is essentially a Tamagotchi the size of an aircraft carrier is a remarkable experience that captivates throughout its narrative and into the freeform modes. It provides the familiar components of the simulation management genre, but with an additional layer of obligation: cohabiting with, neglecting, or even governing your newfound homeland.
Conclusion
The Wandering Village is a commendable addition to the city-builder genre. It’s a largely unchallenging fusion that intertwines simulation management with a hint of pet care. A somewhat slender experience, with a lackluster and slowly progressing narrative, yet it still manages to enchant in its own subtle way.