Gaming Editor Louis Wright finds ‘Lonesome Village’ to be an endearing and wholesome experience
Lonesome Village was received for free for review purposes
Introduction
With an ever increasing plethora of games in the lifestyle and farming genres, it takes a game of either fantastic quality or genuine uniqueness in order to stand out against the competition. While the polish of Lonesome Village may suffer at times, its ability to define itself in what kind of game it wants to be and its almost overwhelming charm are both things that cannot be ignored.
Gameplay
The gameplay of Lonesome Village is split into two sections. The first of these are the puzzle elements where players must solve a variety of challenges to progress to higher floors of the tower and rescue the townsfolk. These puzzles differ vastly in the skills required to complete them from floor to floor ensuring that they are not overly repetitive in what the player must do, making sure player engagement is not lost. Moreover, the progression of said puzzles is satisfying and follows a well-plotted difficulty curve with the intensity of the puzzles and time required to complete them steadily increasing and ensuring that the game always feels rewarding in some sense.
However some of the puzzles, for example one requiring the player to lay out a path for a bird, are not properly explained in how they work, therefore in these cases more indication to the rules of the puzzle, how the bird moves in the given example, is something that would greatly benefit player experience.
Lonesome Village differentiates itself enough from its competition to justify its own existence
The second half of the gameplay follows the more typical lifestyle elements seen in other games. Over the course of the game the player is rewarded with increasingly more tools and villagers that they can use to interact with the world and receive more quests that they can complete. This, much like the puzzle elements, creates a satisfying level of progression where the player is not handed everything at once, deviating from many other lifestyle games, and encouraging them to complete quests as they receive them and learn how to use the tools they acquire. This prevents the player from quickly becoming overwhelmed with content at the beginning of the game and eases them into the deeper elements of the lifestyle sections, as well as allowing them to explore all of the content the game has to offer without fear of missing key features.
What truly ties these two halves of the game together, however, and differentiates Lonesome Village from other similar lifestyle games is how within both halves progression can only be achieved by playing the other section of the game. Villagers must be interacted with and their quests completed in order to unlock new puzzle levels, and sequentially puzzle levels must be completed in order to have new villagers join the village in order to unlock new tools and functionalities. This style of progression through the game ensures that the player always feels as though they have something to do and some progress to make through the story.
Moreover it also acts as a great incentive for players who only want to play one part of the game to interact with the other, as it results in them receiving more content that they will enjoy. By allowing progression to work in this manner, Lonesome Village differentiates itself enough from its competition to justify its own existence.
Art Direction
As previously mentioned, games of oversaturated genres such as the lifestyle genre need to have a sense of genuine uniqueness to them in order to stand out. Lonesome Village does so in this regard by having a charming and likeable art style that grips the player. By utilising vector images for the sprites of the game, its art style becomes all the more recognisable and synonymous with the game, allowing it to stand out visually. This art style is also endlessly appealing and very suiting to the game’s design. The characters and world are purposefully designed to effectively convey the atmosphere of the game from a purely visual standpoint, that being a wholesome and light-hearted adventure with some sense of mystique.
Moreover, by producing the game’s sprites in this manner, it allows the game to become more dynamic with how sprites are presented as they are still visually appealing from any level of zoom. This allows the camera to be taken more advantage of in storytelling- which the game often does. This benefits Lonesome Village greatly as a more dynamic camera in the game’s cutscenes and action events prevents the visuals from becoming stale.
Performance
This leads the game to be a fairly smooth experience throughout with not many hiccups in performance that hinder the player
For the most part Lonesome Village runs well, not suffering from much, if any, lag or completely game breaking glitches. This leads the game to be a fairly smooth experience throughout with not many hiccups in performance that hinder the player.
However, there are some small issues in regards to the overall polish of the game that should not be ignored, especially because of the ease that some of said issues could be corrected. For example, there are some mild issues to do with screen tearing around certain assets in the game, particularly those that connect the ground and water assets. While small, problems such as these are still noticeable and add up to detract from the overall enjoyment that the player has with the game.
Moreover, some aspects of the control of the game should be reconsidered. For example the navigation of the inventory can sometimes be cumbersome having to sort through all of the tools, key items, and general items that are acquired throughout the game. Having the tools in their own section separate from the general items (like the key items already are), would mitigate the issue of inventory management.
Sound Design
As with most lifestyle games, the soundtrack of Lonesome Village is heavily reliant on ambient backing to develop and establish an atmosphere for the player. In this regard, the game succeeds massively presenting an auditory experience that is relaxing and is never overtly overpowering to the player via its soundtrack. Moreover, the soundtrack of the game is one that can easily double, and is recommended, for casual listening outside of the game for when less aggressive music is required, such as studying sessions.
However, while the soundtrack may be a solid foundation, elements of the sound design struggles in areas. Specifically, the sound effect used for the menu icons becomes grating very quickly, as it is incredibly abrupt and does not mesh particularly well with the other sound environments within the game. On top of this, most sound effects struggle with poor audio balancing as they are quite loud in comparison to other audio such as the aforementioned soundtrack, requiring adjustments in the settings as to correct these issues. Finally some elements of the game that feel as though they should have audio ques attached, such as a piano puzzle early on in the story, have no audio, only being accompanied by what feels like a stark silence. These issues are ones that can hopefully be corrected with adjustments to the game’s audio mixer, and the addition of some alternate sound effects.
Rating
7/10
Conclusion
Lonesome Village is a game that can easily be recommended to fans of both the lifestyle and puzzle genres. The game is a fantastic entry into both and seamlessly ties the two together through its carefully considered progression paths. At no point does it feel overly forced or tied down by how the two halves of the game are interwoven. However, this does not exempt the game from having issues in particular areas. Thankfully, these issues are permissible and do not make the game a tiresome experience. From its charming art-style to its well plotted course, Lonesome Village is a wholesome and enjoyable experience.
Trailer
Lonesome Village is available for purchase on Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox
Specifications of system used for review:
CPU: Intel(R) Core(™) i7-10700K CPU @ 3.8GHz
Memory: 16GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
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