Mini Settlers is a city building game that you can actually enjoy and put down

You can't buy Little settlers Now, but I think you should play Free demo “Introduction”. And Full game wish list If you dig it. It's not quite like any other city building game you've played.

Little settlers It is “mini” like minimalism. It's in the same genre, but far removed from the games you love Cities: Skylines 2 (A choice with some proven merit). Your buildings are not rendered in 3D using real-time lighting. Your buildings are colored squares, sometimes with a few disc tokens stacked on them, in the shape of a tabletop. Your routes don't have traffic, but they have engines (small boxes) that take resources between nodes. When things go wrong, you don't receive depressing news about pollution and riots; Some people leave their homes, but they will come back if you fix the problem.

Mini Settlers is not the game you can play to satisfy your lingering suspicion that urban planning was your missing calling. In this week's Progress-Free demo, mines and quarries have endless resources. There's no “money” to speak of, as far as I know. Apple farms should be placed near apple orchards and water pumps powered by water, the rest is up to you. The interface feels like a thought experiment in how far you can go with traditional city sim HUDs, but then someone made it happen.

The biggest challenge I faced in the two sessions I held was the logistics of textbooks, at least from a suburban or small town perspective. After it developed Sim City For the past decades I've tried to keep my residential areas (downtown and the homes you build around it) away from anything resembling production, like rock quarries and lumber yards. Instead of boosting housing values ​​or improving aesthetics, which is nonexistent, this gave me a whole lot of supply bottlenecks to try to overcome.

Households wanted a regular supply of apples and water, but the spacing of everything led to a huge increase in transportation work. Each road is a maximum of seven tiles long, and each has a worker who moves back and forth between waypoints, dropping goods off at buildings or leaving them for the next worker on the goods road. I wanted to create a simple town populated by people who build wooden houses and eat apples, and instead, I had a small-scale job interview scenario at Wayfair, complete with small warehouses and delivery times.

But, here again, Little settlers Different, even when you're hitting. All you have to do is remove the roads and buildings that are not working and place them in better places. Buildings take a while to build back up, but there's no real timer to the game unless you want to enable one for personal bests. You can also enable background mode so that the quiet simulation keeps running while you do your best work on a Friday afternoon.

The “Intro” for the Steam Deck has not been verified, but the developers have an official layout for it. I think it would do the trick, but there are so many cumbersome trackpad directions left in the game that it feels grid-based enough to do more with gamepad controls. As for performance, it's great. At 30 frames per second, My Deck guessed it could last for about five more hours.

Little settlers It's scheduled for release in 2024, and appears to be PC-only on Steam at the moment. The minimum requirements are a Core i3, 4GB of memory, and Intel HD Graphics 4000, but “integrated cards work too.” As the developers at Knight Owl Games note, wishlisting a game helps circulate it within Steam's recommendation algorithm, even if you don't end up playing it outside of the beta. I'll point out again here that the demo doesn't save your game when you exit, it's not another design choice to keep you cool but just a demo thing.

Between this and Against the stormI'm enjoying the recent expansion of the “city builder” genre. It occurs, oddly enough, by shifting to a much smaller size.

Listing image by Goblinz Studio