Steam Library: Life is Feudal: Forest Village

Life is Feudal: Forest Village is a game about happiness. It is also about the lack thereof and the fact that life will go on, regardless of whether you are unhappy. Life will continue even when your last piece of clothing rots and when your last hammer breaks. It will continue when your village becomes overgrown with ancient trees in a year, among which wolves and bears will roam. And by the way, you won’t die either, you’ll just have a so-so mood.

The main thing is to build a mushroom picker’s tent, a lumberyard, and a fishing dock. Today, we are not only in the forest but also on an island.

What does an enthusiast of economic strategies need for happiness?

First of all, a sandbox. A wild construction site where meadows of resources grow, herds of resources graze, and deposits of resources are buried.

FV sets up decorations satisfactorily with a plus. Plus – for generosity. You ask the map generator for a huge piece of land so that you never have to worry about a lack of space for construction, and the generator will pour so much black soil into the sea that you will never have to leave the debut island. Just build, build, build, and build new neighborhoods, design medieval highways, and fence hunting grounds.

All the negatives are for the insurmountable boredom of the landscapes.

Maps need a highlight. Some kind of attraction. Let’s say, since we are on an island, let the generator occasionally produce sandy bays. Or, on the contrary, steep rocky shores from which bears driven by evil fate and unfinished algorithms will throw themselves onto the rocks. Or let there be a peat bog in the depths of the forest from time to time. Or just a lake with carp. Or a completely stupid ravine overgrown with wild raspberries. Something that I would want to reach out to civilization. I would want to build a hermit’s hut on a lonely coastal cliff, I would want to arrange a whole Port Royale in the bay, I would want to surround the lake with fishing huts.

No, there is nothing. Just a huge piece of land with trees and monotonous shores. Happiness was close, but it passed by. But – we’ll survive anyway.

Because the actual construction begins further, and that’s where everything is in order. There are plenty of diverse blocks in the constructor of the perfect medieval city. Pixel fortresses know absolutely nothing about real feudalism, and therefore, they all think of living in abundance: regularly eating meat, dressing in furs, working with steel tools, and living in communal mansions. Forest Village caters to infantile ignoramuses. The client immediately put everything in the construction panel, from two-person huts and huts for gatherers of fodder to a whole brewing production chain and metallurgical industry.

Apparently, fate has prepared a great future for my wards, in which yesterday’s villagers dominate in all conceivable spheres of human activity and decide the fate of the world while sitting at home on an unsinkable cruiser. It only remains to collect a hundred thousand million tons of useful digital resources and build the dream of a king at x10 speed.

After all, no one is stopping us. At all. The success of the forest village is so firmly in the hands of the gamer that you just want to howl from the inevitable success.

Let’s imagine that we quickly skipped the straight-line, like a broken training mode, sighed disappointedly, not finding a campaign in the game, and launched a regular map with standard settings. What can spoil our carefree game? In theory, there are two ways to lose peasants. You can either not feed them or leave them without heating for New Year’s.

It seems that’s it. There is nothing else to understand about the forest people. They will walk in rags, hit rocks, and chop wood with their hands, eat only fish and mushrooms, hate their lives, but continue to work and reproduce. Even wild animals are afraid of such tough people. The most that brown bears, gray wolves, and other wild boars allow themselves is peaceful excursions to the center of forest civilization.

The problems of heating and feeding are solved in the style of browser tycoons. At the start of the game, several buildings are laid down, about four or five. Then a team of builders is allocated, and if you don’t mess with the timer, then for the next 20 minutes, you can go and do other things. Then you need to allocate the residents to new jobs, and that’s it. After that, the peasants live on their own, consume the excesses issued at the beginning of the game, stop enjoying Mondays, but don’t give up.

As an experiment, I left people locked in the forest on an island to themselves and went to the movies. And you know, nothing special happened. The abandoned foresters coped with the task of surviving two digital years without any problems. They built themselves a couple of new houses, although none of them guessed to do so, so in addition to vegetarianism and other asceticism, the unfortunate ones had to learn celibacy.

That’s when happiness left me. Strictly speaking, the main challenge of any economic strategy (namely, building a self-sufficient system resistant to external threats) was overcome in ten clicks and twenty minutes of drinking tea. I turned out to be unnecessary for Forest Village.

Such a game, in turn, turned out to be unnecessary for me. After poking around the main menu for a couple of minutes, I was still able to find some kind of real puzzle in Forest Village. The client presented me with a new debut, with only one starting tent, just two residents, and a limited supply of basic resources.

What exactly and in what order to do when you have absolutely nothing and no one, is never obvious, and this one and only puzzle of existence in Life is Feudal: Forest Village forces you to play the game for real. The problem is that there is only one real Christmas tree ornament, which brings true gamer joy, in the game. You have found out that the path through the forest goes from E2 to E4 – not immediately, but still – and won. And the promised breweries, bakeries, wheat fields, joyful prosperous citizens… sooner or later they will come, you just have to want it.

Life is Feudal: Forest Village, I remind you, is a game about happiness. Hypothetical happiness that comes when you solve all the local economic puzzles that don’t exist and still manage to build a viable village that can survive the winter without you.

P.S. If you’re really bored, Life is Feudal always allows you to play as each individual citizen. And personally kill a bear with one arrow, then go twice from the unbutchered carcass to the warehouse and back. The pleasure is mind-blowing.