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Banished

The small town builder survival game Banished is a one-man indie game released in 2014 by Shining Rock Software LLC and it quickly became a hit.

The game premise is that a small group of people are to construct a medieval settlement out in the yet pristine wilderness. Depending on the starting difficulty they may or may not have a selection of seeds, animals, tools and other items at their disposal from start.

The first challenge is to get your newly established villagers to survive through the first winter without freezing or starving to death. And that can be a challenge indeed. The second challenge is that the manpower, in particular in the beginning is severely limited.

While trees regrow, stone, iron and coal does not. Once your settlers have picked up and used the easily available resources lying around on the surface in the vicinity, it is needed to make quarries and mines. Both of which are not unending. So as the game progresses new sources have to be found. There is however also the possibility to buy resources from the travelling salesmen arriving to the village at intervals. But that is of course only doable if the villagers have anything to trade in exchange for the valuable commodities…

The development of Banished is considered finished by the author, so there will most likely not be any future updates or additions to it. As it is, it is a quite impressive little game with good replayability, even if the number of different buildings and developments are a bit on the limited side. But thanks to the procedural generation of the maps, climate differences, and the random events that may occur games can be different enough. And challenging enough.