Review of The Wandering Village - The world is built on the back of a giant

The Wandering Village invites players to take care of the landscaping on the back of a huge world-moving creature that everyone calls Onbu.. Read our review of The Wandering Village right now.

Developer Stray Fawn Studio has been making games since at least 2016 with cute art styles and creative concepts like the genetic survival game Niche. This Swiss studio is made up of just a handful of developers working to create games that are not only fun to play but also have messages that players can leave the game with.

These messages are present throughout their new game The Wandering Village where the player often has to decide how they want to survive on the back of a giant creature called Onbu. The name Onbu appears to be derived from the Japanese word for piggyback, referring to the civilization that survives and thrives on the creature's back.

For all The Wandering Village players are faced with various choices about how they want to take advantage of or take care of the creature that gives them a home. The onbu is not hard to please, as long as you don't pluck out its spines and remember to feed it from time to time. Players can ignore Onbu of course, but this will quickly end your session due to poison and lack of resources.

Instead, you can form a bond with Onbu, working with each other for mutual benefit. Onbu will provide you with the supplies you need to clean his back and power your equipment while you provide him with guidance and food to make sure he stays healthy. On the other hand, you can always just extract resources from Onbu willy-nilly, but this will quickly deplete the animal's health and kill it.

There are several ways you can see the world and your home, whether it be from a village perspective, an Onbu perspective, or a world view. Each of them gives an idea of ​​how the characters fit into the larger world. Onbu is just a regular sized creature on this planet and it's great to see your tiny village built on its back from afar. Alignment gives even more perspective on how small the village is.

wandering village works as a great balancing act where you have to worry about whether your decisions will damage your home. If the Onbu dies while you are on it, your home will again be destroyed by the poisonous spores that infect parts of the planet. These poisonous mushrooms are the ultimate antagonist The Wandering Village and almost always mean death.

In literally every playthrough so far, I've succumbed to the poisonous mushroom plague that invades Onbu's back. When a poison cloud roams the large creature's back, it infects Onbu with poison and also creates poisonous plants around its back. These plants spread very quickly and can get out of hand if you don't always have someone working to get rid of them.

Most of the time it seemed that there was no way to get out of such a hole. Once you manage to make your way through the poison cloud and those invasive plants start sprouting around your island, you can pretty much kiss your settlement goodbye in a few days. Since this is a major part of the gameplay, unfortunately it prevents the player from accessing all the late game stuff.

While not impossible, this one negative force in the game seems overwhelming in a way that dominates the player, even on the lowest difficulty. Hopefully Stray Fawn Studio offers more ways to deal with the fungus threat in the future as you progress through Early Access in Steam. This is one of the few disadvantages when playing for long periods of time.

Managing population growth is also an important part of this game, as there was more than one session where you would lose a large group of people because you had too little food. Managing your population with the resources you have is a must if you want to go without losing groups of people. It also means scaling up production to make sure you have enough crops and cuisines for your population.

Keep in mind that playing for an hour or two on the same file will cause your buildings to collapse as they degrade over time. This will happen when you least expect it, potentially taking an entire resource gathering area or house. While they can be repaired, this will come at the cost of having to disable certain buildings while everyone is working to restore things.

Players who are less inclined to care for the giant fictional creature can take advantage of it by depriving it of natural resources such as blood and bile. The blood can be used as a food source, while the bile can be used as fuel to get rid of the poisonous fungi that appear. However, you will harm Onbu and cause him to lose trust in you over time.

When Onbu doesn't trust you, you lose control over how your house behaves. However, if you gain his trust, you can order him to do various things such as choosing a path or launching an Onbu through a dangerous poison cloud to limit his exposure. You can tell Onbu to rest if you want to send Scavengers to look around.

However you choose to proceed, you do so with a difficult choice in front of you. If you want to build a truly prosperous village, then you may have to balance between taking some of Onbu's resources and giving him some extra love to show your appreciation. However, everything should be in moderation, otherwise you will not be able to make the gentle giant your friend again.

The last word

In conce, The Wandering Village is a great management game that has an important message. Mechanics will tell your story, whether parasitic or mutualistic. Stray Fawn has done a wonderful job of creating a game that teaches the player the importance of being kind to nature before nature leaves us.

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