Lords and Villeins Review

Lords and Villeins is a top-down, micromanagement, colony sim videogame, developed by Honestly Games and published by Fulqrum Publishing. The game places the player in the role of a customised ruling family tasked to build and govern over a settlement. Lords and Villeins lays the groundwork that the country you reside in has a new royal family to bow down to in hopes of profiting from them as a vassal.

The player’s ability to prosper as a ruler is defined by how well they prioritise the needs of their villagers, as well as balancing the economy of the local and caravan businesses. Thankfully, Lords and Villeins has a list of tutorial missions to learn several facets of the game — called Ruling Lessons. These missions introduce the player to the types of villages they can make in a custom playthrough, which starts with your family and two others.

At the start of a playthrough, you’ll be zoning where houses and businesses will be, building, and planting crops that grow in the specific season you’re in, all while building your family’s manor and watching the dippy villagers go about their day. Between the first few hours of play and whenever you want to build a caravan marketplace, you can leave the game running without any issue. The occasional pop-up announcement requesting for a new family to arrive in town and the stacks of abundant resources left about the place will flash up.

It was at this stage that the cute, cosy colony my family (the Sheilas) had helped construct by delegating tasks to their serfs could not entertain the dullness of waiting for stuff to happen. Of course, being negligent while playing, I did not see the notification that people were starving and had to intervene before a family of farmers died. This begs the question if they were any good at farming to begin with?

Setting up the markets for the locals and caravans is the player's first taste of how economic management works. Its basic mechanics revolve around what your villagers and caravans can sell. Depending on the map’s resources, acquiring primary resources like stone will be done through trading materials. Expanding on market prices and specific productions, the player can manage the flow of imports and exports automatically. In short, buy low, sell high.

Your residents can sustain themselves with the right building and resources supplied to them; however, they will rely on the player to buy items like clothing, tools, and the occasional top-up of wood and food. In return, they pay a monthly tax on everything they sell, lining your pockets with a regular pay cheque used to grow your holdings even bigger.

Families with specific professions can either be bought with royal favour or random ones arrive on your doorstep asking for residency. Professions are categorised into several tabs: peasant (farmer, fishmonger), clergy (papermaking, beekeeping), and noble (jewellery maker, artist). Jobs like servants, law enforcement, and the clergy are made up of chosen members (by the player) from the available families.

Disregarding several vocations needed to keep your town alive, the clergy are the most notable members in the game. From congregating in the church every Sunday, the clergy are responsible for maintaining graveyards, winemaking, and creating literature with the doodles in the margins. Furthermore, the relationship your family and the clergy have is crucial to keeping the other residents happy. If bad, they (like all the townspeople) will pack up and leave.

As the town progresses, days count up—or count down—to winter, where all your work is put to the test to prepare for the inevitable disease and/or starvation. You are warned of the dangers that winter brings before the season begins. Though, I was struggling to get my people fed before the season changed due to bad crops, resulting in everyone suffering a slow death; ending the reign of the Sheilas.

Lords and Villeins’ art style is similar to Graveyard Keeper in its inspiration of 10th-century architecture, fantasy themes, and texture details. I can imagine the game would benefit from a port to handheld devices like Switch or become compatible with the Steam Deck in the future. Letting gamers play it anywhere they want to would help with the slower parts.

The best part of the game is the variety of buildings you can create. Carefully laying out where everything and everyone will be on the user-generative map takes the cake, and lets the people eat it too. A creative mode where the player can make up their perfect community or copy the layout of towns from other games like Stardew Valley while listening to the several soothing songs playing on loop would consume all my time

Lords and Villeins, however, is a very long and arduous game. Because of this, a lot of time and patience is needed to be sacrificed to be fully engaged. The game isn’t worth playing in short bursts; more in long sessions to truly benefit from its gameplay. 

Nevertheless, Lords and Villeins is an open sandbox of possibilities that only limits you to the size of the map and the slow process of convincing people to live in your growing township until, at the end, you have a thriving city to call your own. But a small warning, the game will only hold your hand in the tutorial missions; once in a custom game, you will always be on your own to make mistakes to try again with a fresher understanding.