Living together is the only way.
The Wandering Village
is a city-building RTS game similar to many others: you gather resources, build homes, and put villagers to work in maintaining your civilization. Except there's one catch: your town is built on the back of a colossal creature called the Onbu, which is constantly on the move.
Traveling through different biomes, which affect the resources and conditions the village must deal with, both the villagers and the Onbu journey on ahead to escape the deadly spores that have consumed most of the land, leaving little livable terrain — terrain that includes the Onbu itself. As they travel onward in search of a better future, the player can choose to live in symbiosis with the Onbu and earn its trust — or exploit the creature for their own selfish ends.
Developed and published by Stray Fawn Studio (Niche), the game was released in early access in September 2022.
The Wandering Village contains examples of the following tropes:
- A.I. Roulette: Onbu will sometimes have to choose between a path with a lot of vegetation and food, and another path where there is only desert and poisonous areas (or similar). Unless your bond is strong enough that he trusts your commands, he can choose the latter, even though it's likely not beneficial to your village and/or himself.
- Disc-One Nuke: Rushing the Scavenger Hut allows players to start exploring places around Onbu. It's the fastest way to gain villagers to do tasks and gain resources without having to rely on harvesting wood and stone from Onbu's back.
- Domesticated Dinosaurs: The sauropod-like Onbu is similar to this, and the Hornblower building can even give it commands to rest, walk, or run.
- Festering Fungus: The main antagonist of the game is a fungal plague that has made most of the land unlivable and can infect the Onbu as well. Clusters of fungal growths are encountered periodically, and release spores that will infect plants, villagers, and the Onbu alike. Villagers and the Onbu grow ill and risk death, although the huge beast can endure being infected for a lot longer than the comparatively frail villagers, while infected plants become covered in fungal gunk that will very quickly begin to spread to neighboring ones. Left unchecked, a single infected plant can lead to most of the Onbu's back being overrun within days.
- Fungus Humongous: The plague is characterized by giant fungi in its advanced stages. Spore clouds, for instance, are represented on the map by clusters of immense toadstools.
- Genius Loci: The aspect that makes this game unique: the village is a living creature that travels through biomes and thus alters conditions of life in the village and has a relationship with the villagers - either a benevolent, trusting one or a parasitic, exploitative one.
- Kaiju: The Onbu is big enough to build a village on.
- Karma Meter: Building trust with the Onbu makes it more likely to obey your commands, choose paths, and keep your village going, while exploiting the Onbu hurts its trust and health, and liable to ignore your orders entirely.
- Meaningful Name: In Japanese, "onbu" refers to giving someone a piggyback ride or, more generally, to carrying someone on your back.
- Mobile City: The titular town is built on the back of a giant Kaiju that trudges along the landscape, fleeing an apocalyptic plague of spores that left most of the land barren. As it travels, it encounters different biomes and climates that affect the resources available to the village and the conditions that it must deal with.
- Shout-Out: The aesthetics and mechanics of the game are inspired by Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Visually, the huts, the villagers' clothes, and some of the backgrounds are similar to elements of that manga, as is the overall backstory of nomads pushed out of their homelands by poison spores. Mechanically, Onbu will occasionally walk through "jungle" biomes where poison spores proliferate, and if they land on your settlement your villagers have to burn them off, similar to the precautions taken by villages in Nausicaä. The larger theme of adapting to a poisonous world and trying to live in symbiosis with strange creatures is also common to both works. Even the name of the creature, Onbu, is similar to the giant pillbug-like Ohmu from Nausicaä.
- Thirsty Desert: Onbu periodically crosses into desert biomes. Hazards found there include patches of scorching hot sand that can harm the beast when walked over and areas of intense heat that harm crop production. Additionally, the absolute lack of air humidity means that no water can be gathered through the air wells, which can grind farming to a halt unless you've set up cactus farms to get water that way. On the other hand, the harsh and arid conditions mean that the fungal plague can't grow there either, which means that no poisoned forests or spore clouds are found here and that this is one of the few biomes with no air toxicity.
- Turtle Island: The Onbu's back is made of stone and soil. It starts the game covered in trees, bushes and rock formations, and can be planted on to grow crops.
- Video Game Caring Potential: You can care for the Onbu, giving it food, earning its trust, and ensuring it stays healthy and happy.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: On the other hand, you can exploit the Onbu for superior materials, including drilling into its back for minerals and fertilizer or harvesting its blood for black pudding, which drains the Onbu's health and decreases its trust.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Treating Onbu badly will cause him to ignore you, or even destroy your buildings by periodically shaking its back. Also, if you do too much damage to him, he can die, making you lose.
- Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: The Onbu resembles a sauropod with six legs.
