The Wandering Village - Switch Review

I love city management/building games—I’ve played a ton. I’ve built cities in Ancient Rome, in space, in haunted forests, and in most places in between. But on the back of a moving, kaiju-sized creature? That’s a new one, thanks to The Wandering Village from Stray Fawn Studios. Fresh out of PC early access, it has now wandered onto Switch, so let’s see how it fits in its new home.

The Good

The giant turtle-like creature on which the game takes place is called Onbu, and he is—figuratively and literally—the heart of the game. Your village needs to form a symbiotic relationship with Onbu, working together to journey across a poisoned, decaying world in search of safety. Apart from just living on his back, he is also your source of resources and you’ll need to balance your gathering with the damage you may do to Onbu. In return for his hospitality, you’ll need to help feed, care for and defend Onbu.

This layer of Onbu management really adds a unique twist to the gameplay not present in other city builders. Managing your relationship with Onbu requires a longer-term outlook as you survey the world map, looking for feeding and resting sites, all while deciding how much of your people and other resources to devote to Onbu’s upkeep. This all has a meaningful impact on the game too—you don’t just need Onbu to live on but to get you where you need to go. You can suggest which way he should head, but if he doesn’t trust you, then maybe he’ll go in the other direction and stroll away from your objective…

On top of Onbu’s back, you’ll find a solid city-manager game, looking after the denizens in all the usual ways—housing, feeding, assigning jobs, etc. This all works well and can be challenging, particularly at the start, as you have scarce resources and more people aren’t easy to come by. The Wandering Village does a good job of getting you up to speed but will soon leave you with a big world to explore.

Finally, a note on the visuals—I couldn’t decide if this goes in the good or bad section of the review. It has a ‘distinct’ style, with your villagers 2D cartoon sprites, buildings 2.5D, and the world and Onbu 3D. I personally didn’t gel with the cartoony 2D drawings and animation, but they were still well done. The style and animation on Onbu, however, definitely work well. Very well indeed, in fact. He’s a charming creature who is very much the highlight of The Wandering Village.

TL;DR

• Onbu brings new and interesting gameplay mechanics
• Solid and challenging city-management fundamentals
• Unique visual style (particularly Onbu!)

The Bad

As is often the case for this genre of games, it was designed for mouse and keyboard before moving to console. Translating the UI and controls onto different platforms is often the area that makes or breaks a game and is unfortunately a pitfall The Wandering Village stumbles into. The UI is busy and difficult to navigate at the best of times, and when playing on handheld, it takes up way too much of your screen’s real estate. There are certainly better examples elsewhere on the Switch. The implementation of using the joysticks feels ‘fiddly,’ both in terms of camera movement and zoom and cursor movement—selecting specific items or resources can be a real pain.

And you’ll be doing a lot of selecting—your villagers are efficient but not very imaginative. They need a lot of micromanagement; while I appreciate that it is part and parcel of city management, some initiative on their part would be nice. If for the last two hours I’ve selected every new mushroom growth manually to harvest, maybe I shouldn’t need to keep scouring Onbu to click on each one to harvest them. Or if I’ve stopped consumption of a particular foodstuff, it would be nice if my villagers could still eat it rather than diligently starving to death. Again, I know it is the nature of the game to some extent, but it is more frustrating than fun and could do with some quality-of-life improvements.

While the gameplay overall is enjoyable, it is not a fast game and has a fairly linear progression in terms of what you can build/do. A simple but slow story guides you around, but with limited impact and endgame, it might not hold everyone’s interest moment-to-moment.

TL;DR

• Busy UI and fiddly fine controls not set up for switch 
• Villagers need constant micromanagement
• A slow and linear pace requires dedication

Final Score: 7/10

The Wandering Village is a good-but-not-great city-builder, helped by being on the back of a giant creature. The presence of Onbu adds some interest and excitement to the proceedings and makes it a worthwhile time for genre fans. However, with a cramped UI, fiddly controls and a slow pace, you will find better games of its type elsewhere on the Switch.

Thank you for checking out our The Wandering Village Switch review, thank you to Stray Fawn Studios for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

• Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
• Bel Cubitt
• Bobby Jack
• Jack Caven
• Nintendo Maniacs
• RedHero