City-builders are not an easy genre to get into. Casual players can often find the mechanics overwhelming, and, frankly, a lot of them have poorly designed UI that make the whole experience confusing. A lot of people will look at something like Frostpunk or Against the Storm and say “well that’s just not my kinda thing.” For some, that may be true. However, I think there are a lot of future city-builder fans out there that might just discover the perfect in-road for the genre in Dawnfolk.
Dawnfolk is simple, casual, and straight to the point. Don’t mistake that for a lack of content or features, however; there are a lot of layers that unveil themselves very slowly over the course of the campaign. In this tile-based city-builder, you’ll start exploring the lands that have been overtaken by darkness, reconquering them in the name of light!
Guided by a helpful flame friend named Leuer who is very obviously inspired by Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle, you’ll take on a minimal world in beautiful pixel art to begin rebuilding civilization. Everything is tile-based on a flat grid, and there is almost no UI nor tutorials to be had – everything kind of just works intuitively.
Begin with a house, build tents on the square below it, forage the forest to the right, set up a farm to the left, etc. You’ve got just a few resources to keep track of, and frankly it’s pretty hard to get to a point where you’re really hurting for anything on the average difficulty. There’s food, people, materials, and light. That’s it! If you’ve been intimidated by the HUD of other city-builders featuring 18 resources to keep track of and menus that run four layers deep, you’re gonna love this.
You’ll need to harvest resources when you start a new level, and more importantly set up automated resources generation. A farm with a field of crops might generate 1 Food per day, while a mine might generate 1 Material at the same rate. You’ll need more tents and upgrades to the main house to generate more humans, and light wells or places of worship to generate more light.
More methods of advanced automation become available once you start collecting Science, but there’s no tech tree or research facility like other games in this genre. Just click on a nice advanced thing and pay one Science to get it. Easy! While doing things such as timbering or hunting, there are 10-second-long bullet hell arcade events to keep it interesting. I don’t feel these add a lot to the game, but I also don’t mind them.
Eventually, darkness will rise in the east! Leuer will give you plenty of warning in the early levels to stock up on light, but you’ll do battle with the spreading forces of darkness every few dozen days by creating and spending light to guard the realm from the darkness in another little arcade game. It’s not complicated or really that difficult to stock up enough light to defeat the darkness, but it adds just the right layer of unpredictability to Dawnfolk. And don’t worry, later levels ramp up difficulty as well.
And that’s the game! You’ll discover new methods of generating each kind of resource and new structures along the way, but that’s every mechanic in Dawnfolk right there. There is a slight increase in difficulty as the game progresses, but on medium mode any genre newcomer should find the exact right amount of challenge, while veterans like myself will breeze through it. I must admit it’s clearly not made for me, with thousands of collective hours in city-builder games, but it’s great for the intended audience.
My biggest complaint with Dawnfolk is that it isn’t really designed for MKB – in fact the controls make use of only the keyboard, and it is really, really awkward to play. It works extremely well on a controller, so I’d only recommend it if you’ve got one, are playing on Switch, or are looking to play on Steam Deck. I also take issue with this because it doesn’t properly train you for the kind of interface you’ll find in any other city-builder ever made, almost all of which require a mouse and keyboard. Fortunately it runs great, and short of the occasional bug that caused the window to deselect, I encountered no issues.
Dawnfolk is the perfect game to play while listening to a podcast or watching TV on another screen. It doesn’t require a lot of brainpower to play well, pauses easily at all times, and has a very minimal interface. I have been disappointed by the lack of full MKB support, and I hope the developer has plans to integrate that soon; it may end up making me shelf the game eventually if I get too annoyed. Regardless, Dawnfolk stands as a great, simplistic entry point into my favorite strategy subgenre for newcomers, and will work just fine for veterans like myself who enjoy multitasking while gaming.
Nirav reviewed Dawnfolk on PC with a review code.
