In The Wandering Village, you build a small community for survivors of an apocalypse to live on. The world has been ravaged and left effectively uninhabitable, but there is a giant dinosaur-like beast that has enough room and resources on its back to sustain some people. Your goal is to keep this community alive long enough to learn what happened to the world. Within this concept is one of the most profound rebukes of the relationship that humanity has with nature that I think I’ve ever come across.
You’re told, right at the start, that you can try to live in harmony with your host… but you may also need to overlook its health to further your community’s interests. And so you can choose to be cruel to the gentle, lumbering, harmless beast that provides your people with safety and a place to live. Yeah, sure, it’s pretty heavy-handed, but it’s also a poignant reflection on the way that we as a species tend to look at the systems that allow us to survive as, ultimately, a resource, and something that’s only worth protecting insofar as it is convenient to us to do so.
The genius of the developers was in making your giant benefactor such a soft and gentle soul. You have plenty of opportunities to interact with it, from finding ways to communicate with it and issue it orders (it may or may not pay attention to you), to feeding it and helping it to look after itself. The creature becomes a major protagonist, and there’s a strong Ghibli-style vibe to the way that you can build a symbiotic relationship with the creature.
I was never able to bring myself to be cruel to it, even to the detriment of my people. And to be clear, there are times when looking after the creature means real sacrifices, right up to actual sacrifices. Ultimately, however, you need to consider whether the survival of the overall community and the creature that sustains it justifies those sacrifices. Again, a heavy-handed allegory, perhaps, but given that we’re all racing towards the point where the sacrifices we will start to need to make just to keep our own planet alive are going to need to be extreme as well. The Wandering Village isn’t preachy about any of this – it’s actually very narratively light. But it’s also quite clear what it wants you to think about as you play.
As a city builder, The Wandering Village is pretty straightforward, but surprisingly deep. It has the standard requirement to continue to invest in technology and build structures that can keep a growing and ever-more demanding population happy and with access to a broad range of amenities. At the start, it’s enough to give them a hut to shelter in and a couple of different types of food, but that level of contentedness doesn’t last long at all.
Meanwhile, you also need to manage all kinds of conditions. Humidity in the air fluctuates, which can affect what crops you can grow. Your lumbering beast needs regular food and rest, and can get sick by walking into poisonous gas areas, at which point it’ll need medical treatment. To help you with all of this is a massive, extended skills tree, though that becomes a big drain on your resources pretty quickly. This isn’t the most difficult or complex city builder I’ve ever played, but it has its challenging edges, from a general lack of space to try and cram everything into, to the general scarcity of resources and the sheer number of things that can go wrong in this desolate, lonely world.
The game wears its indie roots on its sleeve, with an aesthetic style that makes good use of 2D sprites for buildings and characters on a 3D model for the dinosaur-beast. It’s a simple and lower budget approach to what a more expensive city builder might do, but it’s also aesthetically lovely to look at. Most importantly, though, the visual engine, combined with the music, really does a lot of heavy lifting to make the game emotionally engaging. That’s not easy to do with a genre that’s more typically associated with city planning than emotions, but it really works to the game’s benefit here. You can’t help but care.
The Wandering Village is the kind of game that you can end up spending a lot of time in, and may just leave you feeling reflective and pensive. It doesn’t do that by bludgeoning you with a narrative lecture. Nor is it over the top or excessive in any way. It’s really very subtle and sedate. Yet, by anthropomorphising the earth as a giant, gentle beast, and giving it a personality, The Wandering Village really does make a stark point of just how cruel we humans can be to our one and only home.
