The Wandering Village is a beautiful colony-sim where you build, and live, on the shoulders of a giant

There’s that moment that happens in movies set in alien or surreal settings where the characters settle or hide on a rock or shelf of land and it suddenly rises up and reveals itself to be a massive, often harmless, beast. The Wandering Village puts you on the back of that beast, trying to survive in a world that’s becoming increasingly hostile.

The Wandering Village has been around for quite a while now, in fact, I had a look in my Steam Account Licenses list and its been there, in some form, since 6th of June 2020. It’s been around for so long, in fact, that the concept of villagers-zoom-creature-zoom-world has been lifted for mobile adverts. That, in fact, was my reminder to finally get around to giving it a proper go, sitting down with it as it cruises into its third year in Early Access.

At its core, The Wandering Village is all about juggling between maintaining your villages and maintaining the beast-nigh-god that you live on the back of. You’ve got almost everything you need for 100 days of survival right there on the back of your Onbu — the gigantic, lumbering, six-legged beast you’ll ride on the back of — but you’ll have to protect and be aware of its needs if you’re going to survive longer.

That twist on your standard colony builder formula is a really interesting one, and no doubt the reason why the team behind it have gone on to great success, even starting to publish other games, in the time since.

In concept it’s incredibly simple: You’ve got a collection of villagers who can take jobs in buildings, you’ll need food and resources to keep your villagers fed and housed, but also to discover new technology. All the while you’ll be able to tell how hungry, tired and poisoned your Onbu is, and as you explore the technology tree you’ll gain the chance to interact with it in different — even sinister — ways, should you wish. This all makes sense as the world is becoming increasingly hostile, malignant, twisted and poisoned.

Soon enough you’re swapping in and out crops as you pass through deserts and heatwaves, you’re using fire to burn parasites off Onbu (well, perhaps once they’ve slurped all the poison from their blood) and actively trying to minimise the risk of the increasingly unsafe world around you. Onbu walks along trails, and while you can influence that a certain amount, the world is dangerous.

Artistically, The Wandering Village is beautiful. I love zooming in and watching my little cell-shaded villagers potter around Onbu’s back. At village level it’s all in a slightly angled 3D view, almost reminiscent of early RTS games but with you able to slide in a little closer at an angle, while there’s a 3D and then map view which have all had just as much care put into them.

Most of your time will be spent split between the innermost and outermost zoom, with the overworld, map view being a great way to see the dangers up ahead before they affect you, as well as a way to launch scavengers who explore nearby points of interest to gather extra resources, knowledge and survivors. The innermost zoom level is where you’ll tweak and refine your village, and there’s a lot of options and settings here to tinker with including a very handy menu which lets you quickly manage job assignments. The middle view, which is easily the coolest looking — if the least used — is reserved for interacting with your Onbu.

I do wish that the villagers did have slightly more willpower, or that idle employed villagers would pick up the slack from the labourers — I had a situation where fungus started spreading rapidly and I needed to build several labourer/worker stations, go into the settings and un-and-re-assign the workers from other buildings to get them to help out. Simultaneously, I can’t help but feel that the developers have missed a trick in having ‘weight/coverage’ of Onbu’s back contribute to its speed or exhaustion levels, as this would encourage smarter village layouts.

Those niggles aside, there’s very little to complain about when it comes to The Wandering Village at this stage of its development. An opt-out tutorial that explains some of the extra menus could help with onboarding, but they’ve got plenty of time to put that in. It’s already an incredibly memorable colony-builder with great art and I can’t wait to see how it keeps developing.

The Wandering Village is available now in Steam Early Access for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s also available on Xbox.