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A villager dies of their ’40s after a lifetime of arduous labour in questionable working circumstances, forsaking a beloved accomplice and younger youngster. How does their widow—each widow—react in Lakeburg Legacies, a self-styled “social-based village administration sim the place love is your favorite useful resource”? By instantly—instantly—hoping to remarry. You’d assume they’d at the very least let their previous love’s corpse go chilly earlier than they moved in with another person, however in accordance with this sport, that is not how love goes.
It is simply considered one of many unusual contradictions lurking in a superficially cute ‘n’ cozy sport that claims to place the lives and lineages of the randomly generated individuals who go by way of my village first, solely to then give them much less persona than an Age of Empires shepard.
Lakeburg Legacies does at the very least begin off on the fitting foot, making it crystal clear that sexual preferences simply aren’t a factor right here. Anybody can marry anybody they don’t seem to be associated to, and any couple can have youngsters. Which might be nice if solely the entire “falling in love” enterprise hadn’t been diminished to nothing greater than a fast click on by way of three random micro-scenarios pulled from a disappointingly small checklist. All love wants, apparently, is me as a disembodied cursor appropriately remembering at the very least one factor on the potential accomplice’s quick checklist of likes and dislikes.
Oh, you hate flowers too however have opposing views on public executions? Fast, put a hoop on it. Marriage ceremony bliss.
Lakeburg is a sport with 10 intelligent concepts that then journeys into 20 methods to spoil them. That extends to the way in which it treats successive generations of peasants and nobles. Youngsters are the lifeblood of the village: the continuation of a loving household, the inheritor to the village’s throne, the mason’s apprentice. They’re additionally robotically kicked out of their houses the moment they flip 18, formally homeless except you manually assign them a vacant abode. A lot youthful youngsters may find yourself homeless if two present widowers wed and there is not sufficient room of their house (or you do not have the sources to develop it) to allow them to all stay collectively—the sport’s solely answer to this self-inflicted downside is to make literal toddlers wander the streets till they both die or survive till maturity, at which level they’ll lastly be given a house of their very own.
The youngsters aren’t alright
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This isn’t solely at odds with the community-focused village ambiance the sport is making an attempt to push, it reveals a definite lack of creativeness. This can be a sport that may present me the exact relationship affinity debuff that happens if a pair do not help the identical champion at a jousting event, however cannot envisage a married couple dwelling in two houses, or taking a light knock to their productiveness or happiness in the event that they must briefly squeeze two youngsters into one bed room? An 18-year-old cannot get saddled with some type of undesirable “caught within the nest” trait whereas I discover the sources—or just the time to note—that I have to construct or assign them an empty house? Do my villagers actually assume so little of their very own youngsters?
Increase the village these folks stay in varieties the opposite half of the sport, and at first it felt like there was rather a lot to absorb; a seemingly infinite barrage of instructional textual content popped up every time I opened a brand new menu. I appreciated the try to clarify the whole lot, even when it did quickly develop into clear that not a lot of it mattered anyway, as a result of though Lakeburg Legacies is packed to the rafters with stats, most of my interplay is frustratingly hands-off.
I do not get to resolve the place any constructing’s positioned, and even what number of of them I can have, and that causes issues on each the non-public and productive sides of the social-sim expertise. I am unable to assemble a producing quarter within the coronary heart of the village, or make some extent of giving the employees houses within the prettiest half and shoving the royals off someplace terrible. I am unable to select to make a village that thrives on exporting manufactured items, or values the humanities and welcoming social areas above all else. I am unable to even construct two lumberjacks’ lodges if I maintain working low on timber or have extra expert tree-felling labourers than I’ve vacancies to fill.
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And though I had extra to do as the sport went on, it was only a better amount of the identical issues to click on. Construct sufficient houses for everybody, be certain folks have a job they don’t seem to be horrible at, get folks married to one of the best accomplice obtainable ASAP, improve no matter services I may. Accomplished. I did not really feel any distinction once I may all of the sudden have folks stay their lives as assassins, grasp forgers, disgruntled mentors to keen apprentices, and even queens: they have been simply one other bundle of stats to shove in a free slot so I may make one other set of numbers go up. I by no means obtained to see any of the garments seamstresses spend their lives stitching, the work some villagers claimed to like a lot, and even simply folks strolling out to the fields within the morning. As a substitute I used to be left staring on the identical common overview for hours and hours, the villagers’ lives diminished to bars and numbers.
It is an oddly impersonal expertise for a sport about relationships. I am a disconnected godlike presence relatively than a bit mayor with large goals, so I by no means have to fret an indignant mob will kick me out if I fail to stay as much as their expectations. There isn’t any rival village to check my efforts to or tempt higher high quality villagers away from. And the villagers do not appear to care a lot about one another in any apparent approach, or take any delight of their work. The one actual objective is to rack up “status,” an ephemeral, passively earned substance that serves as an finish sport rating as soon as my preallocated variety of in-game years have run dry, which is then transformed into cash I can use to unlock art work displaying generic scenes of village life in a gallery. There’s nothing significant to attempt for.
Lakeburg Legacies likes to faux its villagers have hopes and goals, however it solely ever treats them—and me—as manufacturing models, not folks.
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