The Wandering Village

A slow-paced yet challenging survival building game set in an immersive post-apocalyptic world with a village on top of an adorable giant dinosaur.

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.

The Wandering Village is a unique yet familiar feeling city builder with a Ghibli style story, an almost cozy pace and a very enjoyable game loop.

Despite some flaws, The Wandering Village still succeeds in creating something unique in the city-building genre that's usually monopolized by AAA titles. It's a game that isn't entirely rooted in building the perfect metropolis or maximizing efficiency by carving a better route to take. Instead, it's about surviving together, adapting together, and the symbiotic relationship between you, the villagers, and the gentle giant carrying you all to mend a broken world. The game feels slightly overpriced for what it is, though it does offer you a lot of replayability after you've finished the story in its Challenge and Sandbox modes.

The Wandering Village offers us Onbu, which is great. It’s great to shape our relationship with him and care for him; however, as a city builder, the game rhythm is pretty flat and lacks memorable moments. It all runs pretty smooth – maybe too smooth.

Building a settlement on the back of a large, wandering creature is original, but also difficult. While the interaction with your walking home is interesting, the gameplay could be more in-depth and the story is boring.

The Wandering Village is a lovely game with an interesting mechanic of travelling on the back of a giant creature. While its visual style severely restricts the freedom of building, it adds to the mood very well and sets the game apart from “ordinary” builders. The developers had a vision and didn't shy away from realizing it. It's a shame that the campaign is a huge disappointment for me.

The Wandering Village marries survival and city-building atop a living creature with charm and originality, but genre quirks, flat storytelling, and a few design snags keep it from soaring. It’s a thoughtful, well-crafted game—just one that asks you to overlook some rough edges.

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.