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In wilderness' loving embrace.

Banished, a medieval village sim full of tranquility that evens out the many hardships of an exile's life in the lush and beautiful, but also harsh and unforgiving realm they've been cast into, is available for $19.99 on GOG.com.

We are the banished ones. Cast away from our homeland, exiled by our own brethren. But the woods are bountiful, the river is full of fish, and there's still months before the winter comes. We will toil and we will moil, from the sweat of our brows a village will rise. We will cut trees to make room for roads and houses, we will quarry stone to build walls, we cultivate the land and hunt the woods to fill our granaries, and we will survive. We must. An outcast is an outcast as long as they don't have a place to call home. A home we shall build then, my friends. Here, in the wilderness no one ever braved. It's either that, or the cold breath of winter and the death it brings. Tomorrow, starts another chapter in our story of hardship. For now, we should rest, and marvel at this beautiful day. This has been a long journey.

Banished is a free-form village sim firmly placed in a medieval setting with every possible calamity that comes with it. You will lead a small group of refugees, exiled from their home kingdom only with the clothes on their back and a small cart of supplies. Now, they need to rip a piece of land from the wilderness and make it their home, where they will live, love, have children, and finally die (let their death be peaceful!). You'll need to keep the population happy and healthy by providing them with food and warm shelter. Watch the town grow as you assign 20 different jobs to build buildings, grow food, craft tools and clothing, and more!

Heed our warning: this is not a city-builder you may be expecting. This is a game of survival where death and despair comes uninvited into the tranquility of your settlement just when you least expect it. We challenge you to lead the Banished, for only $19.99 on GOG.com.
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Emob78: They need everything handed to them a silver platter with glistening polygons and surround sound stereo goodness. Anything less for them would be uncivilized.
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Fenixp: Yes. That's exactly how all young people these days work. Do you also remember how grass used to be greener and sky bluer, and those extremely pixelated videogames without high polygon counts or surround sound stereo made millions?

Oh. Right. Grass was not greener. Sky was not bluer. And games with 'retro graphics' are extremely popular nowadays, not to mention stuff like Minecraft. So I guess those days are now!

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Emob78: I think some people who don't like Banished are not seeing it for what it is.
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Fenixp: Or they just don't like Banished! I'm sorry for being so sarcastic, you're obviously very polite and are trying to be nice, but I always found similar viewpoints to be a bit insulting, even when you don't mean it like that. Not talking about the crazy generalization I have nabbed at earlier, you're basically saying that 'People don't like it because they don't get it'.
I think the issue is that Banished's greatest mechanic is also its greatest weakness. There are a few achievements, but they don't really serve much purpose. This isn't a building sim where you level up through the ages, build some knights and go conquer your enemy on the other side of the map before he gets to the iron age. That sort of 'age of empires' style RTS game has been around for a LONG time, and I think we've been at least partially conditioned to accept that as a basic foundation for building sims. Same with story. Banished puts a few struggling people out in the middle of the woods and tasks you with helping them survive. That's it. As a traditional building sim as we know it it does have problems, but if you read through the creator's blog and interviews, you'll see that wasn't what he was going for. He wanted to create a semi-realistic survival building sim. And that's exactly what game he developed.

Of course it would be fun to be able to build more things, but to what end? Bakeries? Swordsmiths? How about drawing out roads to link maps together like in Sim City? How about age advancements where you could build stables and later primitive automobiles? Oil wells? Movie theaters? Shopping malls? It can get ridiculous when you think about what you'd like to see in a game like Banished. Those sort of things are simply beyond the scope of both the developer and the theme of the game itself. Yes, the late game does become a bit of a numbers crunching multi-tasker, but it's still a fun game that delivered on its promises.

And of course there will also be DLC and mods as time goes on, so even if some didn't get the things they wanted from the core game, they will soon enough.
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Emob78: ... And of course there will also be DLC and mods as time goes on, so even if some didn't get the things they wanted from the core game, they will soon enough.
The first thing I need is a proper sale for the game ;-) It'll be an insta-buy on discount.
wasnt this reviewed in the newest issue of game informer ? i know they liked it also
You know, I'm really curious to see how well this sold overall. It must be doing pretty well since as far as I know it's been in the top 5/10 sellers on Steam since release, and it has been a bestselling title on the Humble Store. Only on GOG it seems to have dropped off fairly quickly... then again we're all a bunch of cheapskates anyhow. =P

The game definitely still looks very interesting to me, but at $20 (or more) for a game it must be something I absolutely want to not bat an eye at a quick purchase. So it's still sitting there while I industriously work on some of my never decreasing backlog. ;)
ill just wait for a quick sake or til its 9.99 or less like i waited for redshirt and the save the queen game ....... mkight be months rho but ill get it