Banished
There are twenty different occupations that the people in the city can perform from farming, hunting, and blacksmithing, to mining, teaching, and healing. No single strategy will succeed for every town. Some resources may be more scarce from one map to the next. The player can choose to replant forests, mine for iron, and quarry for rock, but all these choices require setting aside space into which you cannot expand.
Banished Review
Banished uses a clean, minimalist, and customizable interface where by default, 95% of what appears on the screen is the city itself. You can (and probably should) add information windows and a mini-map, but even with that it’s a far cry from other series like SimCity or Tropico whose interfaces and pop-ups can dominate the screen. The lack of external interruption makes it easy to turn on Banished and lose several hours to the passing of the seasons.
People, more than anything else, are your vital resource. They need homes, food, decent clothes, tools, emotional support, medicine, and more. Every mechanic, every building you can place, and everything else you can do relates back to that central theme of survival. If you can’t gather enough food, your people die. If they’re stuck outside for too long, or don’t have warm clothing, they die. Each time you fail as their leader, you’re reminded of the loss with a grating sound and a yellow gravestone. These serve as a one-two punch to punish you for failure because losing citizens makes it that much harder to keep up the resource flow. One fewer worker means you can’t gather food, stone, wood, or anything else as quickly. When children die, it’s even worse, though you likely won’t know it for some time. As your population ages, you eventually lose more than a few citizens to old age, and the best way to replace them is to give your younger citizens houses in the hopes that they’ll reproduce and bolster your future numbers.
While the process of survival is never-ending, holding out against the elements amid the hostility of the untamed natural world is a small but powerful personal victory. Villagers have names; they’re born, grow up, and eventually die under your intense supervision. Banished reinforces the human drama with its brutal difficulty and negative feedback loops. It’s fertile soil for some of the most remarkable emergent storytelling around. With relatively few, well-designed mechanics, the game weaves a powerful tale of empathy and desperation and is a high-water mark for narrative elements that mutually reinforce mechanics. Even better, this is a very human story divorced from the Western tropes common in the loosely imperialistic messages of other, similar games. It’s just you, your people, and their strong desire to live.
Extra Tags: Banished, Download Banished, Banished Download, Free Banished, Banished Free, Banished Game, Banished play