One Life Left

I don’t like real-time strategy games very much. Turn-based ones like Fire Emblem occasionally entertain me, but for the most part I prefer to play games where you only control one character, or maybe a small group. As such, Banished is not the kind of game I would usually consider playing. As a top-down city- building simulator, Banished should never have appealed to me and seemed destined to slip past my radar. That is, until I got my hands on the thing.

My big problem with playing strategy games is that there are too many little people to control all at once and I can’t make them fight properly and oh god I forgot about the buildings and what the hell is a pylon, how do I even make tanks?! There is a lot going on is what I am saying.

Banished slows all of that chaos way down. For one thing, there is no fighting in the game. Each game starts on a randomly generated map with a small group of villagers. Banished from their previous homes, the villagers must build a new town in which to survive. No bandits attack the town; no monsters or wild beasts stalk the forests. All that needs to concern the player is the resources they must gather and the buildings that need building. To do this, the player merely marks an area on the map to gather resources or clicks on spots where they want buildings built. They can then go into the menu and assign some villagers to those jobs, and the villagers automatically go to work.

All that is left then is to sit back and wait until the player needs to manipulate something else about the town. If the player isn’t too keen on watching a bunch of digital villagers gather wood and raise houses, the game has an option to speed up time. And the beauty of Banished is this simplicity of gameplay. Once you get some resources flowing and have a stable source of food, your town will be able to make it through the winters and you just need to keep up with the pace of growth. There is no win condition except surviving and growing your small settlement into a grand town that you can be proud of.

This is not to say that the game is not challenging, because it certainly is. The three starting difficulties merely grant you a different number of starting resources. “Easy” is quite liberal with its starting resources, even building you some houses to get you going. “Normal” is where I spend most of my time, and it grants you enough resources to be able to muddle through the first winter or so without panicking. The “Hard” difficulty is where things get tricky. On this level you barely have any resources and the villagers have just departed the cart they came in on. With no buildings and few resources, the player will need to play strategically in order to keep their banished families fed and sheltered through the first year’s winter. Even once you have gotten past the starting difficulty, spikes in population or natural disasters can wreak havoc on a town, requiring some quick thinking and careful planning to survive.

When all is said and done though, it is not the game’s difficulty that drew me to Banished. Instead, it is the stories that the game is capable of telling. While the only pre-written narrative that the game will give you is that your villagers are banished, the mechanics allow you to create and discover your own narratives within the game. I built some new houses in my town the other day so that the kids who were coming of age could move out of their parents’ houses.

A ten-year-old girl immediately occupied one of the houses. She lived alone for a full three years before marrying (the game takes place in the Middle Ages — it was a different time), and the entire time she was the town’s only merchant, dealing with the traders from the outside world all on her own. It was a random moment that I had not planned, but one that drew me so much deeper into the game. Suddenly, alongside the groups of faceless villagers, I had a connection to one person within the village: this spunky ten year old who decided to be a merchant. Every time she made a sale it brought a bit of a smile to my face. Call me sappy or ridiculous, but moments like that make Banished well worth the $20 price of admission. And hey, the whole game was created by one guy, so that is pretty cool too. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a town to run.