• Year played: 2021
• Playtime: 1-2 hours
• Completion level: a few full playthroughs

To put this game in the correct context, the first thing to know about is its developer, Sokpop Collective. Sokpop is a unique indie studio that puts out a new game every two weeks. They're usually small and simple but highly experimental indie titles focused on exploring a single mechanic or gameplay loop. There's a lot of games in their catalog that don't really work out in the end, but they're always interesting and unique regardless, and since they're generally very cheap there's not a lot of risk in trying them out.

Simmiland is no exception. It's a god-game where you play an invisible diety trying to help a small village of people grow and survive. You have a deck of cards at your disposal, each one allowing you to take an action to affect the village. You can change the weather, spawn resources like rocks and trees, and prompt your followers to investigate an object to learn what to do with it (for example, investigating an herb to learn how to make medicine from it). Cards have an energy cost associated with them called faith, which is accrued when your followers pray to you.

Each playthrough only lasts maybe 15 minutes or so, since you only go through your deck once, and when you run out of cards, the apocalypse comes and finishes the game for you (if you didn't lose the game due to all your followers dying first). You're rewarded with points based on how well you did, which you can spend on adding more cards to your deck, extending your future playthroughs and letting you get even further next time.

Apparently you can grow your tiny island village to a proper civilization with skyscrapers and space travel if you get far enough. I only made it through this loop a handful of times before I felt like I'd had my fill for the time being, but I plan to come back to it again sometime. It's not an extremely complex or deep game, but it is fun and enjoyable enough to spend a casual hour here and there playing it. The biggest thing I'd change about the game if I could would be the addition of a pause button, since everything moves at real time and things can get kind of hectic, especially when your villagers start doing something stupid like eating toxic berries and falling over dead. It'd be nice to pause for a second to be able to think about what I'm doing before I play my cards. But part of the charm of the game is that it doesn't take itself too seriously, so deep strategic thinking isn't really needed here. For only a couple bucks, it's a game that's definitely worth picking up and messing around with for a few hours.