Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In Italy, the umarell is the retiree, invariably male, who spends his days watching construction work take place and offering the workers unsolicited feedback. It could also be you in Manor Lords, a medieval simulation and strategy game from Polish developer Slavic Magic. You play the Manor Lord — or perhaps Manor Speculator, given the vast swaths of empty countryside that make up your lands and whose development is the aim of the game.
As soon as you task your subjects with a construction and zoom in on their little plot, your umarell instincts emerge. In a regular city-building simulation, there’s a limit to the level of detail you’ll get when you look closely at an individual building. Here you can survey so closely that you see oxen dragging construction materials over, logs being cut, foundations being laid. The epitome of this is “Visit Mode”, in which you can don your finest cape and walk round your town in third person, presumably muttering under your breath about the work ethic of your villagers and the mud on your moccasins.
However imperfect its layout or economy or defences, though, you’ll soon learn to love your village. I enjoy that mine lacks enough oxen so everyone has to share; the scrappy marketplace that only sells berries and clay tiles; the impractically far-flung apiaries I sited next to a thicket so they’d look nicer. Everything happens so slowly and organically that you can’t help but invest emotionally in your settlement’s progress, leading to a game that feels both very big and very small, in the best possible way.
It’s a far cry from the identikit zoning that occurs in games such as Cities: Skylines 2. There too you could identify individual inhabitants, but to what end? It always felt as if you were creepily surveilling them rather than conferring a story or personality on them. In Manor Lords, because every villager is assigned to a specific job, you get to know them and start sympathising with their daily struggles.
And struggles there will be: for every law-abiding, yarn-producing citizen you welcome, there’s a bandit out there who just wants to steal your clay tiles and kill your sheep. As your settlement expands and grows richer, you’ll need to arm your villagers and fight back, defending the coat of arms you’ve created (a teal and yellow pattern featuring a dog, since you ask). Combat isn’t particularly profound, but adds a nice sense of responsibility and jeopardy to proceedings.
This is an early access game, and many elements are still to be ironed out: features are missing, there’s a severe lack of variety in voicelines, and some of the text hasn’t even been formatted properly. More problematically, the in-game help pages are emptier than my village’s marketplace, so when something’s not working it’s hard to tell whether you or the game is at fault. But this is a title seven years in development by a solo developer, and it’s an impressive accomplishment. If, just as I do with my village, you can see beyond Manor Lords’ rather ramshackle facade, there’s a great deal of character and charm within.
★★★★☆
Available in early access from April 26 on PC
