I was in the mood for game that let me build creatively, so I decided to give Going Medieval a try. It’s a game I was sort of interested in since I saw it covered on Let’s Game It Out and it’s not a terribly expensive experience.

The art style goes for a low-poly style. Your settlers look like PS1 characters and everything in the world works on a blocky grid system. It’s the best art style for a game like this. You aren’t right down in the thick of it with your settlers, so you don’t need a bunch of detail, having just enough to be able to identify different types of terrain or plants is perfect. There are dynamic seasons in this game, which the art style helps communicate. Seeing your farmstead covered in snow during the winter is a real visual treat. The music in the game is the type of flute and drum medieval music you’d expect from a title like this. It’s not terrible, but it does get repetitive during play sessions that may last a few hours. It’s the only real sound in the game as there’s no dialogue and most activities don’t make noise, besides chopping trees.

The premise of this game is you manage a group of settlers who are fleeing into the wilderness to start a new life. You have a selection of tools to direct them around with to begin building your new settlement. The best I can describe this game as being in-between a Cities Skylines & a The Sims. You aren’t as focused on all aspects of your settlers’ personal lives like The Sims, but they aren’t just stats on a page like a larger city builder game. It’s honestly a great median that hooked me instantly. You are free to build to your heart’s content without worrying about money. Long as you can procure the resources you can build it. Like a Civ game there’s a tech tree that you can devote resources to, to unlock new buildings and materials.

A quality-of-life feature that made this game much more intuitive to play was the ability to set a schedule for your settlers, giving them hours to work, play, and sleep. They aren’t as finicky as a Sim, so they’ll stick to that schedule with little deviation. You can also set the priority of different jobs, like making sure a settler cooks food before they do research or milking goats before chopping down trees. The chart can be a little daunting at first, but as you play you realize what jobs need to be priorities and which can be “When you get to it” tasks. Each settler has a different set of stats, so some may be better cooks, while others more adept at digging holes, so you have to factor those in when assigning jobs. Skills like cooking, chopping, botany were easy to level up because they were tied to regular, important, activities. I found skills like carpentry harder to level up. The carpentry skill is tied to a particular workbench, so the only way to level it up is to grind out items, even if you don’t need them. The game didn’t explain well that you can mine stuff from the get-go. I figured that’d be a technology you’d have to research, but nope, it’s down there in the tasks menu ready to go.

For as simple as this game looks, there are a lot of deep systems here when it comes to building. You are encouraged to build your settlement like a real Medieval village would be set up. When building fortifications to defend against bandits, you want to build walled off courtyards to funnel them in, that’s if they get pass the archers on the outer wall. My big defense build was creating a two-layer wall around the main buildings. It gave my archers a height advantage while keeping the enemy melee troops out. You can also build cellars, which the game encourages you do. Storing food underground helps in the summer to keep it from spoiling faster, because temperature does factor into your survival. I noticed in the winter my stocks of barley mash weren’t fermenting into ale anymore because it was too cold, so I build a little barrelhouse with torches on the wall to solely store my mash. I took a cue from colonial houses I’ve visited and built a summer kitchen outside, partly because I made my whole settlement more colonial than medieval in design, partly because I wasn’t sure if I put an open fire indoors if the game would burn down my house.

You can build storage areas that settlers will bring loose items to, like garden vegetables, lumber, clay bricks, leather, weapons, etc. You want to build a roof and shelves on this storage area to slow down item deterioration and you want to store the dead bodies of your enemies away from the village proper, not a great morale boost having dead people around. I built a small stone church, that does help boost morale. You start out with a farm animal, for me it was a goat. The goats in this game procreate like rabbits. I finally built a pen for them to keep them from wandering into the woods and getting eaten by wolves. While I was at it, I built them a little lean-to, more for set decoration than expecting the game to acknowledge it. Surprisingly, the game does recognize it and at nights my goats would all huddle up under to sleep. It’s little touches like that that really endear me to this game.

There’s a good sense of progression through the game. I started with a little wooden hut with sleeping mats on the ground and slowly but surely upgraded my settlement with new buildings and better living accommodations. If you are making sure to keep all your bases covered, your settlers will stay happy and prosperous. My first winter was a bit rough, but it made it memorable. The wolves that lived in the woods on the outskirts of my settlement were getting braver and wandering into the village for food since all the deer and hare had moved on for the winter. This made hunting for meat dangerous, but the worse thing was I ran out of hay for my animals halfway through winter. This was when I still only had a simple log cabin for my settlers. I had to tear the thatched roof off my house and stockpile to use it to feed my goats through the winter. I learned a lesson there about resource management, going forward all roofs were either made of sticks or lumber.

You start the game with 3 settlers and the game drip feeds you new ones on occasion. Some are escaped prisoners of war from neighboring factions. I had to start turning those ones down, because I didn’t spec into combat technology much, so early on, any enemy attack led to ¾ of my settlers dying unless they hid indoors while the raiders destroyed all my outdoor kitchen and workshop equipment. When you go hunting foxes or wolves, sometimes they’ll fight back. I did have occasions where the hunter would still try to kill the wolf even as they were being mauled to death. I’d manually have to make them flee so they didn’t kill themselves. When my max settler count was about 6, losing one or two puts your whole settlement at a disadvantage. And as far as I can tell, your settlers don’t ever get married and have children, you only get new settlers by having them wander in. With the small number of settlers, I wasn’t sure if this game was wanting me to build just one big fortress they all lived in together or create more of a rustic Medieval village dotted with personal cabins. I guess that’s up to your role play preferences. If you wanted, you could just build one big building with all the workstations and furniture packed in it to really min/max the game at the cost of realistic layouts.

All in all, I really enjoyed interacting with the systems in this game. The simplistic grid design gives you the freedom to build any type of settlement you can imagine. The systems are easy to learn, but complex enough to keep you engaged. I’ll admit, once I had my sturdy Federal house and a brick perimeter wall the game sorta plateaued. I had accomplished all I wanted and the last few upgrades and the notion of influencing 100% of the region wasn’t enough to keep that same energy going.