The Wandering Village is a neat little city building game that centers around its gimmick of constructing your town on the back of a walking, giant dinosaur. Though it has a lot of overlap with the ideas of other city building games, it does a good job of using this gimmick to make for interesting gameplay mechanics.

You can expect the usual resource management out of Wandering Village that you can out of other games - wood and stone are needed for basic buildings, those buildings unlock new tech, and that tech lets you build more advanced buildings and collect more advanced resources. As a part of its tech tree, you can also research a variety of technologies that allow you to interact with the Onbu itself - these open up a number of interesting and important gameplay mechanics that become important as the game progresses.

Instead of having seasons, like a traditional city builder often does, the Onbu wanders the world and finds its way into new biomes. These biomes have different modifiers that change crop climate, the amount of water you can collect, and different unique encounters. As the Onbu travels, you'll have to help manage its hunger, tiredness, and its health in order to keep your village going.

In the world of The Wandering Village, there is a poisonous blight that has sent the world into a sort of apocalypse, with some of the only respite being on your Onbu's back. Certain biomes will be much more toxic and dangerous than others, and many will have things like parasites that can infect your Onbu, and these conditions must be managed by your village to prevent collapse.

The Wandering Village essentially consists of a story mode that has a moderate amount of challenge, a cute narrative, and a surprisingly good "final boss" - something that I can't say of many games in the genre. Following this, there are survival-style game modes where your goal is to walk a certain distance with your Onbu, with difficulty modifiers that add extra challenge.

I'd overall say that The Wandering Village is definitely worth a play - I ended up doing one playthrough of the story and a few runs of the survival mode. I don't think I'd say this game has the depth of other city builders like Oxygen Not Included, but that can also be a good thing! If you enjoyed games like Frostpunk, this one will probably be for you too.