What sets Banished apart from other games in the 'try not to die' genre is how complex it is in a myriad of tiny little ways. All of this takes a long, long time, so it's a good thing that Banished comes with multiple speed settings, all the way up to 10x, and an active pause that allows you to issue commands even while the game is frozen. You'll set people to gather rocks and wood for construction of buildings, farmers and hunters to help with food, herbalists and teachers and much, much more. The long term goal is simply to keep them happy and healthy as long as possible while you slowly (oh so slowly) build their rinky-dink little settlement into a sprawling new community.

Presented in top-down Omnipotent-o-Vision, the game allows you to scroll all over your new world and see everything your little exiles are doing. It's all about population management, town design, and maintaining health, happiness, and all the necessary supplies, and the way the world works means you can't just plop buildings down willy-nilly.īanished actually comes with several helpful tutorials that will guide you through the basics of everything from construction to resource gathering and more. You find yourself in control of a group of exiles, struggling to survive with only what they've managed to carry in the wilderness as they attempt to start a new life on a randomly generated landscape. Yaaaaaaaaaaay! And yet, despite its seemingly bleak premise and brutal gameplay, Banished is actually one of the most curiously compelling and absorbing games around.

There are no wars to wage, no dragons to slay, and the only real goal is staving off the slow march of death via the cruel machinations of nature. One-man studio Shining Rock Software's indie sim game Banished is, conceptually at least, pretty simple.

Banished pc game review