This is the kind of game that you come back and play once a year or so. This is the comfortable pajamas of video games. You take on keeping a group of settlers alive in a medieval setting, with no combat at all- but plenty of ways to lose your people. Starvation, illness, and the elements will steal your workers away from you if you aren't careful, but once you find a balance and learn how to get over the initial difficulty, it becomes very rewarding to watch your village grow and collect more resources for them.

There's tons of mods for this also, adding all kinds of new buildings and jobs for your settlers, so there's plenty to do. The music and sound effects are very mellow, and while the graphics are nothing special, they're not ugly either. A recommended play if you just want to sit and chill.

As a fan of Management games, I really love this! I had a lot of fun playing it, though it's learning curve is often suggested to be Dark Souls-esque where you try to learn more each time and the fight for getting resources becomes a massive challenge. Coupled with creating a thriving community, keeping them fed, clothed and warm, you often find yourself running short in a few areas and half the fun is seeing how long you can keep your colony up and lasting.

Being a large-scale management sim, you don't get much of a personal touch for the characters unlike Rimworld, but this is a different style of game that hearkens back to the Sim City genre of games where you play god and try your best to raise up this society best you can.

It's a solid city builder game that can be quite difficult if you're not careful early on. The gameplay loop is satisfying as you actually get to see your little community grow and prosper in a very natural way. There's not a whole lot to do in the game so once you start snowballing, you're pretty much done. The population growth is very organic and nicely simulated as every citizen actually has to be born and grow up before they can be put to work. This can however make the game really tedious if you have a huge death wave early on, because then you just have to sit idly by for a long time as your population bounces back to normal again. Overall it's a good city builder game if you're looking for more of a challenge, but it lacks replayability in my opinion since there isn't a whole lot of different things to do. So every playthrough is probably going to be more or less the same in the end. Maybe I'll play it again in the future some time, who knows. All I know right now is that I'm done with the game and I'm satisfied with what it had to offer, even if it wasn't that much.

People bash it and i can see why but let this get on the way considering that THIS IS THE GOLDEN STANDARD for Colony Builder games, the game shows its age but up to this day there are projects that have been in active development for almost half a decade and have NOTHING to show for it, vs banished's 2 year development, anything better than this is a great game, if it cant match Banished it is a waste of time,even now i still come back to this game just to have a good old time, cant say i do the same for some of its competitors,COMPETITORS THAT SOME HAVE COME OUT THIS AND LAST YEAR MAY I ADD

I can see the reasons why this game is so highly regarded, but I think the AI problems are massively downplayed. I started the genre recently with Wandering Village and went from there to the more known/well received. For this one, I've already went through 3 different attempts and they all failed for the same reason. Duke Nukem knew what sex is, and he didn't tell ANY of these motherfuckers. Keeping happiness high, health high, stocking up on food, good stock of tools and clothes, none of these are what actually makes the population grow. It's a specific set of actions at the right time and the hope that they'll not screw up the family distributions once you start building or upgrading houses.

And my God this game is slow. It's the only one I've seen with a 10x speed and somehow it feels even slower than other city builders at 2x. It's a good game on theory. On practice it's one of the most boring games I've ever played and if it was the one recommended to me as "beginner friendly" I would've given up on this genre altogether. At the very least it made me appreciate the Londoners more because, as annoying and disruptive as they are, they still do their fucking job and only ruin a run if you actually screw up.

"The townspeople of Banished are your primary resource." And by far the most whimsical to manage of them all...