The Wandering Village

A captivating city builder where you play a group of nomads building a new home on the back of a magnificent, giant creature.

With beautiful Studio Ghibli-esque aesthetics, The Wandering Village is a city building sim with real soul. Beneath it all, there is a really beautiful metaphor at play with a wider message regarding the relationship between a civilisation and its environment.

The Wandering Village is a worthy addition to the city-builder genre. It's a mostly undemanding hybrid that mixes sim management with a touch of pet care. A slight experience, with an uninspired and slow-moving story, but it still manages to charm in its own quiet way.

The Wandering Village is a solid city-builder with a comfortable learning curve. It offers a challenge while drip-feeding you new ideas along the way.

To me, this is a good representation of what a Cozy Game can be and one game I can see myself returning to here and there if I want to just relax for a bit. Yes, the waiting can get tedious and the happiness upkeep is a chore, but, hey, like Meat Loaf once said: Two out of three ain’t bad. Besides, what other game allows you to live on the back of a giant docile creature that wanders a Ghibli-like world?

"Would you build a village on giant's back?"

The Wandering Village has a grasp of the building blocks of its genre, but never truly capitalises on its core mechanics or its premise. Rather, it presents an enjoyable but somewhat shallow city-builder that just happens to also be on top of a wandering behemoth, rather than truly embracing and exploring what that could mean in gameplay terms. While its visuals and audio are both lovely, there is little here to really sink your teeth into, particularly for a veteran of the genre. The Wandering Village is worth a visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

The Wandering Village, between limitations, interfaces to be refined and a somewhat static rhythm in the long run, remains a valid, inspired product that deserves to be tried by those looking for something different.

The Wandering Village has its issues, most games do, but even these issues I outlined never felt off-putting to me. There is an engaging experience here that you don’t get to see very often. Wandering the land on the back of your Onbu, feeling like you stepped into a Miyazaki classic.

The Wandering Village is the perfect game to add to your city sim collection, with its random biomes and sizable research tree, it offers its own twist to the genre. The added story was well told and never felt forced on my villagers or me. If you like city builders, then this is a must play.