[REVIEW] Banished

 Released in 2014 by Shining Rock Software, Banished is a city-building strategy and resource management game that feels in many ways like Sim City took a step back in time and decided to start less as a city and more as a single barn and roughly a dozen NPCs who need to survive in the wilderness. Sim Survival, if you will, only without the crafting aspect and individual focus that has come to be associated with survival games. The game received mixed reviews upon release, and to be honest, I can kind of understand why some people felt pretty torn where this game is concerned.

 
PEOPLE WATCHING

As I mentioned, the game opens with around a dozen little humans and a barn, which contains a limited number of supplies. The assumption is that these people have been, well, banished from some larger colony, though why they were cast out and where that colony is remains an utter mystery. The characters have their ages listed as being in the teens and early 20s, so unless we’re talking some weird dystopian future from a young adult novel, it’s tough to imagine why this group would be the one cast out and not, say, a group of criminals, or a group of elderly people in some attempt to lower population strain. While it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, it remains this little oddity that sits in the back of my mind whenever I play. The game is named Banished, after all; shouldn’t we get some reason as to why these people have been banished?

Regardless, you have to move quickly to get these people shelter. They can’t all sleep in the storage barn… for some reason, so they need to build houses to live in, gather food to eat, and generally turn the mess they’ve found themselves in into a thriving community. You can gather resources from the surrounding wilderness, such as wood, stone, and iron, as well as some wild-growing food that will get your little village by until farms can be started. From there, it’s just a matter of staying alive and making low but steady progress.

The game is pretty difficult in the early stages, and you’ll find yourself running low on food or firewood fairly regularly. Such things aren’t immediate disasters, as people can still survive in unheated homes for a little while, and they won’t die as soon as there’s no more food in storage, but it’s a sign to shift your resource-gathering in a different direction if you hadn’t been doing that before. The biggest problem I found in regard to this is that you have no control over the population. Houses are typically lived in by 1 “adult” male and 1 “adult” female, and I use “adult” in quotation marks because kids seem to move away from their parents at the age of 13, and start having kids at roughly the age of 16. And these ages don’t correspond to the number of years that pass in-game — at one point in year 7, I noticed that one of my starting characters had somehow aged over 20 years since the game’s beginning. It’s a weird and contradictory system, and while there is an easy and common mod you can download to make the ages more realistic and correspond with the game’s cycle of seasons, it seems like this is something that one shouldn’t need a mod for.

Anyway, you can’t really control the population, and citizens will move into their own houses when there’s a house available, and start having kids as soon as they can. The only way to prevent this is to limit the number of available houses, which caps the population at 5 people per house, but then you run the risk of not having enough labourers to complete the work that needs doing.  And also putting up with an alert that tells you that more houses need to be built. It’s a double-edged sword, and frustrating as that may be, I suppose it does make a good point regarding civilization and progress. In order to gather the resources to build new things and advance what your city can do, you need more people for the labour, which comes at the cost of needing to provide for them, so you need more people to labour in farms and at hunting, and so on and so forth. Establishing equilibrium is never the goal of these games. The goal is always expansion, ever onward.

WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER

 
There is plenty of room for your village to advance and gain fair more than it started with. (Maybe you shouldn’t have banished all this fantastic talent, eh, hypothetical distant colony we came from?) You start off with small houses and dirt paths, but as you gather more supplies, you can build bigger and stronger houses, paved roads. Bridges to let you cross rivers and expand your territory. Schools to make your citizens more productive. Taverns to sell them alcohol and “make them happy,” according to the in-game description, which I think suggests that maybe some people are drowning their sorrows, but eh, what do I know? Mines and quarries to make resource extraction easier. Trading with people from other unseen colonies far beyond your borders, hospitals to cure diseases, orchards and livestock and all sorts of things that will make life in your little village pretty comfortable.

The game’s biggest drawback, so far as I’m concerned, is that it quickly becomes rather tedious. Gather resources, build a thing, gather resources, sit back and wait and let the city essentially take care of itself. Supposedly natural disasters can happen, but I played the game for nearly 20 hours and never once did anything in my city catch fire, get destroyed by snow or rain or wind, none of that. Maybe I just got lucky, but weirdly, some disaster might have been welcome, since it would have been a break from the game’s status quo. Going from small to great is going to take you a long time. The game is difficult in the early stages, keeping the population fed and housed, but after a while it tapers off and just becomes… a lot of watching, with the occasional intervention or decision to build something new.

I will say this for Banished, though: it achievements are really achievements! So often in games you get an achievement that’s less something you actually achieved and more just a mark of where you are in the game. “Complete chapter 1 of the story,” “do the most basic combat move,” etc. It tells you that you did something, and gives you quick gratification that keeps you playing so that you can get that gratification again. Not so with Banished.  As of the time of writing, the most common achievement by people playing the game is to have a population of at least 100 citizens and have them have a high happiness rating for a full 10 years of game time. And that was achieved by less than 21% of players! Yes, a lot of people play a game for only a few hours and then don’t play again, which can skew achievement data a bit, but that is impressively low. You’ll likely be playing the game for a good 10 hours or more before you even come close to that. The least common achievement? Building a town that has a population of over 500 after 200 years! Less than 1% of players have this under their belts, and it’s easy to see why. Putting that much time and effort into a game that is challenging at first but becomes drastically less so to the point of boredom after a while is a big ask.

RANDOM NAMES FOR A SOAP OPERA

 
Banished isn’t a terrible game, and I like the concept behind it, but it’s somewhat lacking when it comes to content. A lot of resource management games are like this, admittedly, though most of them tend to have a competitive aspect to the game, defeating a nearby army before it defeats you, or something like that. Banished doesn’t have that. Honestly, from my standpoint, that’s great. I loved games like Age of Empires as a kid, but generally wished I could just play the game at my own pace, concentrate on gathering food and supplies without having to immediately put that into a military aspect because I was in danger from random computer-controlled people who wanted to take my land. I just wanted my little pixellated citizens to live a comfortable life!

But I think Banished takes that a little too far, and makes the pace of the game a touch too demanding and too slow in the wrong places. It’s not a steady game. Or, it is steady, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. It stays one way for a long time, and then changes, stays steady for a while there, then changes again. It comes in fits and starts, and the slowness and weird combination of having both nothing to do and no way to tell my citizens to move a little faster and gather more potatoes or else they might freaking die of starvation, left me a bit bored.

I did, admittedly, get some degree of amusement while streaming this game, because I began to fill the silence with fictional town gossip. “Did you hear that Romainey used to live with Mikale but now she’s moved in with Rake?” “Kiyoshio used to live with Torrest but then they had a fight and broke up and now live in separate houses.” And don’t even get me started on the kid who was literally named Demon, who eventually grew up and got together with a woman named Honor! (I should point out that the game generated these names for my village’s citizens. I had no hand in that hilarity!)  Even though they were generic blank-slate NPCs who didn’t do anything different from any other generic blank-slate NPC, the fact that they had names meant, in my mind, that they had stories, and I was determined to find those stories out!

I’ve played this game on and off through the years, and even though I don’t play it for very long at a time, it’s a game I can and do come back to every now and then. It may lack in steadiness and general content, but I do like the setting, and the peaceful atmosphere. The game’s soundtrack is just plain lovely to listen to, the graphics are definitely decent for the time it was made, and if there’s anything within the game that you’d like to tweak so that it fits better with your playing style, there’s an actively modding community on Steam that probably has exactly what you’re looking for. Banished feels like a game that had a lot of potential that went somewhat unrealized, and while that doesn’t make what’s there bad, it does leave it feeling a bit lacking.

But lacking or no, I still play it, and I still enjoy it, so it definitely has something going for it. It’s worth giving a try if you like resource management and city development games but want to try one that starts off with far less technology than games like Sim City and also removes the in-game competition and military aspect of games like Age of Empires.