Typically, “God” games as they have become known put players on a quest to make their city/town/village as desirable a place to live as possible, but Banished asks nothing more of you than to make a functional environment for your ever-expanding populace to survive in.
BANISHED THE GAME GRASS HOW TO
Likewise, I expanded my village into a reasonably-sized town in order to prevent a singular tornado sweeping up my entire population once again.įailing to jump over Banished’s many hurdles but then learning how to masterfully clear them the next time around is the game’s most alluring facet, and it adds a true element of survival that we’ve rarely seen in this genre before.
So as not to risk bugs wiping out my entire supply of food once again, next time around I ensured that I left a measurable distance between each crop field. What is so utterly engrossing about Banished is that by taking these mistakes into account the next time you play, you’ll eventually learn how to create a sustainable environment for your population to live in. My first few attempts at building a village within Banished’s unforgiving world were quickly thwarted.įirst, it was mass starvation that offed every single one of my villagers, after I had failed to assign enough of them to my crops then, a bug infestation which destroyed all of my food, again leaving the denizens of my small plot of land to starve then, a lack of firewood caused them to freeze to death then finally, a tornado swept everything up in its path aside from Herbert and Gertrude, two aging survivors who eventually died of natural causes before giving birth to any offspring, thus leaving my village devoid of human life. Thanks to Banished’s simplistic user interface and relatively basic concept-unlike the SimCity series, there are no wages or taxes to attend to, with trading being the sole form of currency-I was able to figure out everything of my own accord after no small degree of trial-and-error was employed. As I’d heard prior to playing it that Banished was a game which heavily focuses upon the survival aspect of the city-building strategy genre, I decided to forego the tutorial in favor of diving in headfirst and learning its mechanics the hard way. Designer Luke Hodorowicz (who was the sole developer of the game, meaning that he has an almost loathsome level of talent) was wise not to mandatorily lump the tutorial at the beginning of the game, instead choosing to make it optional.
If I’m making Banished sound off-putting, that’s probably because it is. Not since the release of Fallout 3, in which I piled an obscene, nigh-on shameful amount of hours, have I found myself compulsively checking in on a virtual world so much so that I’ve become a little worried that it will soon conflict with my myriad of other responsibilities, and that I’ll soon come to value my accomplishments in the dreary medieval village of Butley (the randomly generated name the game assigned to my world, which I kept because BUTT LOL) more than I do in the real world. Rarely do I let a video game consume me in the way that Banished has.