While I loved big simulation games like Cities: Skylines growing up, I wasn’t a SimCity player growing up. Instead, I was drawn towards the more manageable SimTown. The expanded city administration, where you can micromanage every aspect of your citizens’ lives without the massive scale of SimCity, has always appealed to me. Maybe that’s why Outlanders, a simple but challenging settlement builder, has now hooked its hooks into me twice on both platforms.
In this small management sim, you take on the role of the leader of an endangered settlement in dozens of scenarios. Some task you with fixing a wrecked boat so you can escape the island, while others challenge you to learn the game’s farming mechanics or build a giant statue out of bread. Don’t let the simple visual style fool you; These scenarios become more and more complex as you unlock more structures and jobs, such as: B. a farm to grow grain, bakeries to produce bread and breweries to gift beer to your followers.
Each time a new structure was introduced I struggled to keep up with adding another moving part to the equation, but eventually they just became another part of my growing toolbox and made for a better simulation experience. This toolset comes in handy in Outlanders’ sandbox mode, which allows you to adjust the biome, map size, starting supply, natural resources, and many other variables before creating a settlement without worrying about goals or constraints.
Outlanders is pretty handy with its simulation mechanics. Your followers act autonomously, but you, as the city leader, assign them task roles and priorities. Because of this, I’ve been constantly moving followers to adapt to the needs of the community. Sometimes I was in dire need of wood, so I sent four people to cut wood. More often, however, it is the lack of food that ruins my settlements, so foraging and farming have remained my focusS. I love calculating which of these areas to invest workers in as foraging provides instant food but quickly depletes, while agriculture takes time to grow from seed but is renewable. In addition to coexisting with nature, you must learn not to deplete its resources before you have the means to replenish them. Failure in this seemingly simple task almost always results in the death of your civilization.
When all else fails, you can issue decrees to your followers such as: B. the rationing of food or similarr the “hands off” decree to ensure no babies are born. They can also go the other way to encourage a population boom or tell people to work less to increase happiness. These decrees will help you fix any problems you may have, but they have unique implications for happiness, productivity, and other areas. I’ve enjoyed walking the knife edge and using these decrees to optimize my settlements.
Each scenario includes a primary objective that must be met for success, as well as an optional mission; These side objectives add an extra challenge, e.g. B. completing the main mission without exceeding a certain number of followers, consistently housing and keeping your followers happy, or harvesting enough resources to repair other structures after a storm. I’ve always strived to achieve these objectives, and I’ve often succeeded, but they’re little more than trophies on my shelf, so aside from the sense of accomplishment, I wasn’t heartbroken when I missed some of the side objectives.
I love that there aren’t many random elements to Outlanders. No tornadoes come to ruin your best plans, no droughts come to destroy your crops, and no invaders come to plunder your supplies. It’s all about planning and resource management within the scenario you are given. Every mistake was my fault. This led to several outbursts of anger as I watched helplessly as my settlement’s predicament spiraled out of control due to poor planning; It only takes a few minions to die—whether of old age or starvation—for the well-oiled machinery to collapse. In one instance, my 16 adult townspeople were perfectly spread out, but when one member died of old age, I had to reassign one of the plant gatherers to fill the vacant lumberjack slot. Unfortunately, this set off a chain reaction of not gathering enough food, and before I knew it, four followers were dying of starvation, and the spiral had begun.
Although I’ve had several settlements that quickly faced doom due to the extreme starting conditions, I always stuck with it and carried the lessons learned with me to the next attempt. I’ve never liked trial and error gameplay, but Outlanders never feels unfair — just unforgiving. You’ll soon see the warning signs of these problems on the horizon. I started anticipating the collapse of each of my settlements before they happened, which enabled me to prevent many of them. This progression – not in game mechanics, but more in the way you think about gameplay and the domino effects of various in-game actions – ultimately made me want to come back for 20+ hours on PC and iOS.
Although Outlanders has been available for iOS via Apple Arcade since 2019, the PC version has become my favorite way to play it. I still have trouble picking the right settler or structure in a crowded area at times, but not nearly as much with a mouse as with a touchscreen. Plus, the widescreen format suits the gameplay and art style, and the well-translated navigation keyboard controls feel more intuitive than the Apple Arcade version, which is surprising considering how that version came out years before the PC release. Either way it’s a great way to play this solid sim, but if you have a choice and portability isn’t a concern, the PC version is the clear winner.
Although I was sometimes worn down by the unforgiving moments of watching my followers drop like flies, I loved how each scenario challenged me to balance all of these factors to achieve a set of goals. Strangers can be challenging and frustrating, but I rarely felt overwhelmed. Outlanders doesn’t deliver the big scale of big city sims that many associate with the genre, but its small-scale approach appeals to the task-oriented part of your brain, creating an immensely satisfying experience that has kept me coming back for more.
