When it comes to playing a city builder or settlement management game, a lot of what’s going on relies on the vibes being just right. Back when I was wasting my life on hundreds of hours of Stronghold’s economics mode, the vibe was about being as close to reality as possible, but thankfully, these days games can choose from almost infinite different theming options. That’s why we’ve now got The Wandering Village, a settlement management game that takes Ghibli and Shadow of the Colossus and throws them both into a blender to achieve something that feels genuinely unique.
What Is The Wandering Village?
The Wandering Village is a settlement management game set aboard a walking colossal creature made of earth and stone. As you collect resources, you also have to take care of the living land beneath your feet or risk upsetting your ride. The game was produced by Stray Fawn Studios, an indie team based out of Zurich in Switzerland, who previously developed the title Niche – A Genetics Survival Game, as well as Dungeon Clawler, a title that combines dungeon crawling with those crane games you see in seaside arcades.
The Wandering Village is the team’s first city-builder, but clearly, the developers have spent a lot of time with the genre before. Many of the gameplay elements on display here are classics of the genre, with the player having to carefully balance resources and building choices to ensure the survival of both the village itself and the very ground that your village is founded upon. It certainly makes for an interesting dynamic during gameplay, but the only way to be sure it’s a worthwhile experience is to take a much deeper dive into it.
City-Building Classics
As I stated above, the main city-builder gameplay is pretty much what you might expect from any game of the genre. You start out with a few workers and have to harvest resources and construct buildings to produce a sustainable settlement. This’ll mean not only managing your resources responsibly but also expanding in a sensible and manageable way to prevent your ride from getting upset with you, or from running out of precious resources too quickly.
You also have to devote at least some of those resources, both human and otherwise, to developing new tech for you to keep expanding. Early on, you can survive with simple water condensers and berry farms, but as your Onbu enters new territory, you’ll have more stringent requirements for survival. It’s hard to grow food in an arid desert, so you’d better have planned for that ahead of time, or you’ll face the end of your settlement. It creates an interesting juxtaposition between the city-building elements and the pet-care elements.
Take Care of Your Onbu, and It’ll Take Care of You
While it starts out relatively simple, the relationship you have with your Onbu is a huge factor in The Wandering Village. Firstly, you have to choose if you’re going to exploit your gentle giant companion or treat it fairly, with the exploitation of your Onbu making certain aspects of the gameplay slightly easier, though they’re conceptually a bit gross; e.g., you can suck out his blood and then evaporate it to produce water in arid environments, but obviously, he’s not super happy about you sucking out his vital fluids. Honestly, the biggest test of the desire to look after your friendly giant is probably the random spikes that appear on his back. Removing them upsets him, but at the same time, the spikes can ruin your town plans.
Honestly, I found it mostly pretty easy to avoid treating my villagers and walking village well, and as long as I kept on top of my resources and what was coming up on the map, everything felt like it synergised well. The UI is designed in such a way that it’s easy to quickly swap between the village, Onbu, and overworld view, and it makes it pretty simple to manage everything as you go. Even better, the single-player story campaign is done entirely at your own pace, with zero pressure to continuously make progress.
Storytime
As you can probably surmise from the mentioned single-player campaign, there’s a story to follow along with as you go. As you start out, you’re basically a village that has had to resettle due to an ongoing issue with poisonous clouds that are appearing all over the land. You come across an Onbu, a giant creature of legend, and begin to live atop it as a way of staying safe from the world’s various hazards. You also discover a piece of ancient technology and decide to repair it, eventually leading to you getting contacted by a mysterious scientist.
Working with the scientist and your advisors, you, as the village leader, are tasked with figuring out where the poison clouds are coming from and how to get rid of them. It’s a relatively simple “destruction/exploitation of nature” plotline, but the utterly charming presentation does it a lot of favours. Sure, you’re not likely to see anything that you’ve not already seen 1,000 times before, but the solid gameplay backing it up should almost guarantee that you won’t care.
The Verdict
The Wandering Village is a fantastic city-builder/virtual pet hybrid game that sees the player looking after the world’s most adorable poop-machine. While the gameplay and narrative elements are mostly old news, they’ve been blended together incredibly well, and the UI design really aids the flow of the game. The story mode is fun, but with this sort of game, it’s easy to see hundreds of replays stretching away into our futures, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier about it.
Developer: Stray Fawn Studio
Publisher: Stray Fawn Publishing
Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: 17th July 2025
