Every now and then, something good happens in this plague world. There may be 10 failed Kickstarters or Early Access projects, but every now and then, something shines. RimWorld is one such game, a colony sim about the hassle of managing a group of idiots in a world full of angry capybaras. These fan-powered projects provide games you can’t find when a developer and publisher are fighting off lawsuits from the Department of Labor or dealing with outrage from non-phone havers.
Going Medieval is an heir to the RimWorld tradition, both in the colony management formula and in the Early Access formula. This time, the setting is Medieval England, Pretty Much. A Plague or Something has devastated the land, and it falls to you to order a group of peasants around, keep them alive, and build a new civilization. If only there was a movie of some kind about the hassles of dealing with British peasantry, but sadly, no such film exists.
Steam is littered with the corpses of half-ass Early Access games, so I always ask if the game is worth buying now. Sometimes, they just throw up their hands and peace-out even if they are intensely beloved with loads of cred. While Going Medieval’s developers seem plenty active and engaged, it’s also pleasant to report the game is surprisingly solid even by released game standards. The core is very much there: There are peasants, you can build a base, you get raided and fight, more peasants arrive, things happen. There are weird bugs at the moment, but nothing you can’t live with if they decide to go take boat rides with the money the way some Kickstarter/Early Access developers do.
The core group of settlers (or settl-er, if you went lone wolf) have an RPG-style array of skills. These cover a blend of concrete skills like Animal Handling and Carpentry and more abstract skills like Intellectual and Speechcraft. There are personality factors at play as well: maybe they hate the cold or heat; maybe they eat a lot but are great cooks; maybe they are religious; maybe they won’t put down the iPhones and avocado toast and get a dang job (I haven’t seen a Millennial trait, but I assume it’s there). The challenge is always balancing the needed skills with the social hassle or benefits of putting up with them, combined with the challenge of surviving in the harsh wilds of pre-Brexit England, which is very unlike the paradise the Tories have delivered. As is, you can mash Random until you get a settler you can live with or you can Yolo Swaggins into the game and deal with it.
The upside is that unlike in some of these games, a low score doesn’t mean “completely incompetent,” just not very good. In those games, it’s like asking a toddler to do the dishes. “Huh? You want me to pick something up? Look, pal, I may HAVE arms but damned if I can work ‘em.” In Going Medieval, they can usually manage a basic task. They might do it slowly and the result might not be great, but you’re probably not screwed if your best dude gets taken out. The micromanagement is less absurd, but there’s still plenty of it. And don’t worry, they remain mostly stupid, just not completely stupid! Sure, guys, plop down a deer carcass in the middle of the bunkhouse. Everyone loves the aroma of rotting flesh. It’s like lavender, you go right to sleep.
From a small cache of starting supplies and a small troop of basic housing, your work will lead you through building the structure for a great civilization. Or, at least, a defensible spot on top of a hill where you can rain down arrows on your foes (archery is REALLY GOOD). From the basic tedium of getting everyone fed and sheltered, the task evolves into researching technologies and production methods and then producing more advanced goods. You’ll take your English peasants from eating raw cabbage and bad booze to…hang on, the English have evolved from that? Really? Well, even if they can figure out ironworking (which I doubt), they can’t win a football game against the Italians.
Colony management games are not so much about the game itself as the interaction between random events, the trials of life itself, and the chaos inherent in any system. Sometimes you watch a helpless idiot try to shoot an arrow at a rabbit and fail in hilarious ways. Sometimes a random guy you rescued from bandits goes into a berserker rage when the bandits show up to reclaim him. I don’t know what happened to him exactly, but he went full “I’M NOT GOING BACK THERE!”, raced ahead of the group, and beat three bandits to death with his bare hands.
There is a roadmap of features to come, but right now Going Medieval is pleasantly, enjoyably playable. Even if the hints of a wider game to come never work out, there’s a good, solid core of bossing around bloody English peasants, and there is no finer joy in life. Yeah, there’s some bugs, but it’s no Cyberpunk 2077.
