My Cozy Apocalypse with the Wandering Village

Posted on October 12, 2022 Updated on October 9, 2022

The Wandering Village, from Stray Fawn Studios, is a unique city-building game in a post-apocalyptic setting. A brief opening cinematic at the start of the game introduces the premise: when a cataclysm drove them from their land, the remnant population followed their elders to build themselves a new village on the back of a colossal beast called an onbu. It’s unclear whether onbu is the name of the species, the name of the individual beast, or both. What is known is that onbu has been lying dormant for years and was awoken back to life at the same time as the spore storms that have swept over the land, poisoning people and plants alike.

The charm of the game’s worldbuilding lies in its simplicity. The gameplay has no fixed end, although there is a symbolic narrative end-point that arrives about a hundred in-world days into the game. This is somewhat similar to the “story mode” that was included in one of Stray Fawn’s previous games, Niche, where the goal was for the descendants of the starter character, Adam, to return to the island that he originated from. Since The Wandering Village is still in early access, it’s soon to tell whether a more narratively-driven mode will be added to the game later, although nothing like that appears on the studio’s current development roadmap.

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