Kainga: Seeds of Civilization Review

Kainga: Seeds of Civilization is a roguelite village-builder with cute graphics, but the game is deceptively difficult. Your time with Kainga will be spent cursing or praising the gods of luck and RNG. Don’t grow too attached to your little village, it can all be washed away in a moment.

As village builders go, Kainga: Seeds of Civilization is unique. The maps you visit are randomly generated (even if I did start to notice some patterns towards the end of my playtime), as are the technologies your village unlocks, but you are given some limited control over that as you usually have three options to choose from that are all along similar lines. For example, one of your first choices in each game will be what kind of house you wish to build. There is a surprising amount of variety available: you could choose to build houses of thatch that will blow away in the wind, mud houses that are cheap but don’t have a lot of space for people, or houses that you can place on top of each other to name a few options I have encountered.

Your early decisions will also inform your later choices. Some houses cannot have attachments such as a bakery, which will limit your options for generating food for your village. The terrain around you will also limit you as some food types can only be planted on certain terrain, such as Paddies (rice) needing to be planted in mud. Some technologies will result in a convergence of ideas to create something new though, such as Paddy and Bricks resulting in a Raised Paddy which produces the same amount of food but can be placed on any terrain.

Every scenario you choose, which always has a prescribed goal, will include whatever biome you have chosen, a number of creatures and resources, as well as two other tribes. Make war or peace, but you’ll have to venture out of your initial campsite to secure more resources, and find glowing pillars of light which provide “inspirations” for your thinker — who is your tribe’s leader. As you progress you can unlock more thinkers with different bonuses. Each inspiration allows you to choose a technology or a passive bonus if you’d prefer. There doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many inspirations you can get but once you have 14 you’ll have filled your bar. You will also regularly unlock festival inspirations at your home campfire. These are particular to your thinker or chosen challenge and grant more powerful, but usually temporary bonuses.

Your time with Kainga will not be without hardship. Your “braves” (villagers) will encounter harsh weather conditions, floods, fires, winds, hostile tribes, and animals. Fortunately you have some options here, from passives that make your villagers hit harder to training your own warriors, and taming animals (which is very difficult). Your thinker will also find themselves under attack as they traverse the map in search of inspirations, as other tribes don’t like it if you think too hard near them.

Kainga actually plays closer to a survival village builder than what I had expected. This is due to one key concept called “Ante”. In short, the faster you expand by placing down banners, which expand your territory and the resources available to you, the higher the Ante. This increases the severity of the different events. That drizzle that hardly bothered you in the beginning of the game will cause your houses to collapse in the late game. The most counter-intuitive part of Kainga is that sometimes you just need to let your village grow, without micromanaging everything as your population expands and your “braves” continue to build houses and gather food.

There are two main ways you will lose in Kainga. Firstly, if your thinker dies, which is very easy to do as they can’t fight back if anything attacks them, or if your last “brave” dies, which leaves you unable to produce more “braves”, build anything or so on. Interesting, military units do not count, so you can lose with 20+ warriors still sitting around your campfire. This is made worse by the lack of a way to save your game, meaning that one mistake will doom your village, and you cannot pick up a game where you left off if you need to do something else unless you leave the game running and paused.

Unfortunately, the AI of your thinker and your units leaves something to be desired. Everytime you unlock a festival your thinker will make a beeline for your campfire and may attempt to continue to do so even if you tell them not to. They will do this regardless of angry tribesmen and giant creatures, leading me to lose more than one game. The same can be said of your “braves” who will often get stuck on something, sit idle even when there are jobs to do, or occasionally refuse to do something they are standing right next to.

The game has its fair share of bugs, and will also sometimes fail to give you a structure you need for a challenge you have chosen, or not recognise when you have completed a challenge. There is also the small issue of tribes that are “neutral” acting in an openly hostile way to you, leaving you the player to assume that all tribes are at war with you unless they are shown to be friendly. I also noted some performance issues during a late-game village with sixty population and at some other points in games.

Overall, Kainga: Seeds of Civilization is a great indie title that is held back by its uniqueness, which can make playing and learning the game frustrating and opaque until you learn its quirks. Similarly, it is hard to move past the issues with AI and other various bugs. The game has potential — with more time to fix the bugs it could be a fun way to kill an hour.