In this dev diary I’ll be wrapping up my 2025 games played review. But first, a quick announcement – Iron Village 1.3 will be releasing on March 24th, the one year anniversary of 1.0’s release! It’s not a huge update, just some bug fixes and a small tree feature I’ll go into detail about next time, but it’s still something! Iron Village is currently on sale for 35% off, so if you don’t have it already go ahead and snag it now. Anyway, now for your scheduled programming:
The Wandering Village
The Wandering Village is a city builder with a twist: you’re building on top of a giant wandering creature called an Onbu. On top of handling the needs of your people, you also need to handle the needs of your Onbu, sometimes balancing between the two of them when their desires conflict (although usually it’s a symbiotic relationship). The Onbu also helps drive the overarching narrative, where you explore and try to figure out what’s behind the contaminating poisonous plants that make this world so dangerous and toxic.
Apart from the mechanics, I found the art style really interesting as well. The villagers look like they’re from an animated movie or TV show, and the cutscenes really drive that home. If you look closely, nearly everything in game is 2D in a 3D world: buildings are beautifully drawn and then rendered as “billboards”; the same is true for the various parts of the background in the world. The camera’s range of motion is restricted to zoom and vertical tilt, so you wouldn’t notice this unless you really pay attention, but it helps you feel like you’re playing within a work of art. The main exception is the star of the game, the Onbu, which is rendered and animated in full 3D.
Spiritfarer
I finally got around to playing Spiritfarer late last year, and wow, what a game. It’s a fascinating exploration of death, and a real tear jerker. (In particular, the mushroom. I won’t spoil anything else.) Even without the overarching story, you get to build a ship and travel around an expansive purgatory world.
Crusader Kings III
Another one of the Paradox map painting games makes an appearance. I started playing the Crusader Kings series back with Crusader Kings II, which was sold to me as more of a medieval politics RPG than a traditional strategy game. And, well, the description isn’t too far off. The third installment plays into that concept more, especially with some of its more recent DLC, like a medieval strategy game crossed with the Sims. (Not to be confused with the actual Sims: Medieval.)
River Towns
River Towns was a recommendation from Buried Treasure, a site with reviews of somewhat lesser known indie games. (They also have a Patreon!) The best way I can explain it is a city-builder flavored Tetris game in 2D. I mean, the original Tetris game is in fact also 2D, but what I mean is you place city pieces on a 2D grid (illustrated in 3D), rather than dropping them from the top.
I have mixed feelings about puzzle games in general, what tends to happen is I get hooked on a neat concept, but then it either gets too difficult or too tedious (or both!) and eventually I realize that I’m not actually having fun. River Towns though managed to hit a sweet spot for me: not overly complex, but still a challenge; enough to get my brain working, but (mostly) not enough to be frustrating. When I finished the main campaign, I felt like it was the perfect length, clocking in at 12 hours total.
Voxelgram
Voxelgram is another puzzle game, but it’s nonograms in 3D. Basically, given the numbers of voxels in each row, along with the number of gaps, you can logic out what the 3D image is. I started playing it on the Steam Deck on a flight, but ended up sinking 40+ hours into it in small amounts over time. The bigger levels can get a little tedious, but it’s still a really neat game. (It also has a sequel I haven’t got around to yet.)
Fortune Avenue
Fortune Avenue is basically a knock off Monopoly.
Except, if you’ve studied game design, you know that Monopoly kind of sucks. Hell, even if you haven’t studied game design, you know how the leader often snowballs to victory, but the game drags on until they can actually properly win. Instead, Fortune Avenue shakes things up to make it actually fun, primarily by adding extra rules. Out of context that sounds like a terrible thing – more rules make it fun?! The idea is that elections come up every few turns, and all of the players vote between two new rules. This means that over time, the specifics of the game keep changing. This can be anything from doubling rent, to making RVs as expensive to stay in as 5 star hotels.
The issue of defeat taking way too long to happen is also addressed, via a helicopter that stalks the poorest player with less than $100k, and eliminates them after a couple of turns. That is, unless the players pass the rule that makes the helicopter eliminate a player with too much money. I’ve managed to win a few games thanks to that one. :) It’s not like this is a serious strategy game, so the chaos this creates just makes Fortune Avenue a fun time.
Littlewood
In my mind, there’s two ways to describe Littlewood:
It’s a farming sim game (i.e. Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, etc.), but with simplified mechanics that really bring the game to its core.
Not only do you get to make your farm, but you put together the whole town.
It’s a little funny how some of the game is quite simplified (for instance, the day/night cycle progresses when you do things and get tired, rather than following real time), but the town building is the most versatile of any game I’ve played in the genre. (Admittedly not that many, but still.) I really enjoyed it, although the thing I found surprising is Littlewood never got any major post-launch updates. I don’t think every game needs those kinds of updates, but this one sets up a really neat backstory, characters that help provide more information, and then kind of just doesn’t tie it all together. Apart from that though, it was a lot of fun.
Anyway, that covers all the games I played in 2025 for any substantial amount of time. I’ll have some Iron Village 1.3 release notes (and release) up next week!