Maybe you have this problem too: There’s a new, or new to you, game you want to play, but you can’t seem to get in the right headspace to learn its ropes. Maybe you’re too tired or stressed out or distracted to give your attention to a bunch of new jargon and menus and button presses. Enter Dawnfolk, a recent city-builder that’s both complex and approachable.
Dawnfolk came out in February, but I only learned about it last week thanks to past colleague John Walker. Its world is laid out as a grid, with each tile representing a biome such as fields, mountains, or deserts. You expand your civilization by filling each tile with buildings, which both earn and cost you resources. All of this becomes a balancing act: Tents and houses give you more people, but those people need to be fed. You build farms to generate food, but those farms cost materials to create. You build mines in the mountains to generate materials, but those mines need people to work them, and now you can’t generate more materials without getting more people, but you’re out of tiles to build homes for those people and need to spend your light resource to expand.
Unlocking undiscovered tiles costs light, with tiles costing more light the farther they get from the center of your city. It’s a resource I didn’t think about much until I desperately needed it, either to grow the map or to fight the darkness storms that occasionally threaten your civilization. Light can be generated from specific buildings, and it can also be farmed from certain kinds of tiles. You get some warning before darkness storms occur, which means I often found myself putting my city-building on hold to frantically amass it, all while facing the same problems I had before my priorities shifted.
This is the nature of city-builders, but unlike other games, I’ve yet to find myself in a downward spiral in Dawnfolk. I wasn’t always flush with resources, and I sometimes found myself with nothing to do while I waited for resources to generate (you can speed up time, but I kind of liked just letting it pass), but I could always do what I needed to with enough thought and patience. Things can get hectic when you’re facing several challenges at once and have to balance multiple needs, but like the game’s tiny map, so far it’s always felt contained and approachable. I’ve only played the first two of the game’s many scenarios, and not yet touched the endless or puzzle modes I’ve seen in its menus, and while there’s depth in terms of upgrading your buildings to give them new abilities, or to laying out your cities to take the best advantage of their adjacency bonuses, it all feels easy to get your head around. It was satisfying to see how quickly my handful of tents became a sprawling civilization, and even when this growth introduced new challenges, I never felt like things were out of control.
Some tiles and scenarios require playing little minigames, each contained to their tiny space. You hunt deer in a forest by shooting minuscule arrows at minuscule critters; light needs to be collected from light wells by moving a tiny jar; darkness storms and monsters are fought with itty-bitty swords and shields. You can upgrade a building to play the minigames for you, or turn light wells into light farms that eschew the need for collection, but so far I love how sometimes I’m briefly playing a whole different kind of game. It helps each tile feel like a whole world in itself, and helps the game’s map feel varied and alive.
There’s a storyline running through Dawnfolk about the origin of the storms and the nature of the companion character who narrates events and teaches you how to play; the menu is full of tiles you unlock with an additional resource to play new modes. All this shows me how much there is in this game that I’ve only scratched the surface of, but instead of the pressure I can sometimes feel when a game hints at its depth, this all feels pleasantly exciting. So far, Dawnfolk feels abundantly relaxed, a lovely little world with so much to do, but one that neither feels too easy or too overwhelming. There’s a demo on Steam if you want to get a feel for it, and the game is also available on itch.io.
