The urge to not play any of the grog-affirming games that I have is so strong, I took a cutesy lil’ city-builder/puzzle to review. And that’s what Dawnfolk is! Half city-builder, half puzzle, all game!
Darkness is swallowing the world, but a spark – or a flame, or a will-o-wisp – named Lueur can help us light it up again. It’s very literal: you’ll use power of prayer, breaches in the planet’s crust and so forth to collect Light which will allow you to reveal darkened squares of terrain one by one.
A lit square allows you to build buildings, one per. And certain buildings have adjacency-based synergies. For example, a Farm surrounded by four (this game doesn’t do diagonals) Fields will increase their Food (one of the four resources) yields. Buildings can also be upgraded to higher versions via the extra-rare Science resource. This can be as simple as Farms giving you access to new crops in the Fields and something as weird as mines turning into observatories that give you Light for surrounding dark squares.
Since Dawnfolk isn’t a game about capitalism, there’s a purpose behind growing your settlements. First off, revealing new squares costs more and more Light as the Darkness fights back. Various buildings allow both building a robust economy that can sustain Light production, but also make this process cheaper.
Then there are periodic attacks from the Darkness. The first and easiest level of attacking are the storms. First, they blanket one square near your city. Then, they start spreading around. A covered square is a square that doesn’t produce anything. Since the in-game economy runs a lot on paying upkeep, this is, sigh, bad for the economy.
Whacking darkness, like most things in Dawnfolk, can be made cheaper/more efficiently by playing a simple minigame. This may include rotating a sword in the right direction to hit projectiles coming from one of the sides of square. You can’t really lose these games, but completing them successfully gives you a resource discount.
Chopping down trees, hunting antelopes, curing zombies – all are done with these low-intensity, low-stakes minigames. They offer a nice change of pace and give you something to do while waiting for a pile of resources to accrue. Much better than the usual city-builder fare of “building during pause, play on 3x speed”.
Dawnfolk is also cool in the in allowing you to choose your approach to problems. You can chop down a forest for instant income, but having a woodcutter hut in gives sustained income. You can destroy an orc village to stop their attacks, but befriending orcs (via a food tribute and a minigame of hovering a heart over orcs) will give you access to their pork farm.
The game world is much more alive as well. Chop down a forest and it will regrow if you leave the square unattended. Leave a forest be without a wood-cutter hut, and it may become inhabited by tasty game animals or nasty wolves. You can even choose to leave useful nuisance be: a dragon may destroy a square now an then, but having it around means you can bribe it to instakill an enemy! Very important with some later Darkness attacks.
Outside of the fairly short campaign, Dawnfolk also offers puzzle modes (including dailies) as well as Expeditions, which are less constrained than puzzles, but still not that easy. This and more is unlocked with blue crystals you earn through achieving tasks in the game. And there’s a lot of stuff to unlock – including cheats and explanations of how special square features work.
Another thing Dawnfolk’s PR people would like me to mention is gamepad compatibility. If you have any experience playing with a controller, you will be able to play this game. Heck, I don’t think I used the mouse at all while playing on the PC – all keyboard, all the time.
Game Good
In conclusion, Dawnfolk is a cute little game, a city builder distilled to the core elements, removing any unnecessary cruft. The addition of minigames works great, and there’s a degree of explorations and discovery that city-builders generally lack. Give it a go!