26th April 2024
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week: good manors and finger patterns.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.
Manor Lords
I’ve been playing Manor Lords this week, ahead of its public Early Access release, and I really like it – I’ve written my fuller Manor Lord impressions elsewhere on the site.
But there’s one thing that bothers me about the game, which I’m not sure is the game’s fault so much as the genre’ – or perhaps humanity’s – and that’s expansionism. The aim of the game, as in so many of these games, is to grow and expand, and in doing so, amass enough capability such that you can take over more land nearby, occupied or not. It’s a direction that has shaped human history for as long as it’s been recorded and probably, long before.
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Yet, it always comes at the cost of the environment around you. You’re forever outrunning the depleting natural resources: hacking down forests and animals you’ll struggle to replace, and pulling up rocks and ore from the ground that don’t grow back. Success brings growth, but growth brings more people who require more resources, which requires expansion. And so the loop loops until you’ve consumed everything around you. But what’s it all in aid of – progress?