I was recently lucky enough to sit down with Craftlings, along with Filip Hansen, the charming Producer at Raw Fury, and his equally charming dog Ponyo to experience the fun new retro-inspired strategy fun-fest.
With an art style and source inspiration that could have ripped from an early 90s Commodore Amiga game, this one plays out like a take on Lemmings with a bit of Terraria and Minecraft thrown in, as you guide your cute villagers on a quest to build, mine, craft and forge their way through pixelated scenarios. The first stage I experienced involved having to protect your people from a nefarious giant octopus, by building your settlement and constructing a weapon capably of destroying the tentacled blighter.
You begin by having to construct buildings to produce resources that incrementally allow you to build different types of stuff to achieve your aims. So to start off with you knock up a Town Hall. You might follow this with a little bolthole for your lumberjack. You then find out you need to mine the hills for rocks – so up goes a mining shed. But then you start running out of wood. So you need a sapling farm. But hang on! You have run out of money… That is because, stupidly, you forgot to build a marketplace to generate more dough. You have to think a few steps ahead in this one – and it can be like spinning plates.
Like the aforementioned Lemmings, the townsfolk are pretty stupid. Unless you put stoppers, the limited amount of crates in the environment, or even signs that restrict the flow of their unending movement, they will walk straight off the edge of the landscape to their death, complete with a cute little animation of an angel rising up into the ether as they expire.
The way your progress is dictated by your own attention to detail and management of resources, movement of your little people, and indeed how you manipulate the landscape, means that this one is fun to play, but also fun to spectate or play collaboratively with a friend. I was an observer to a fellow journalist playing, and at times spotted things that she didn’t as we forged a solution to destroying the giant octo-foe.
In a second scenario I experienced: new parameters, new abilities, and new obstacles were introduced – including enemy skeletons and the introduction of fighting units and combat. The finished game promises much, much more with a huge variety of biomes, enemies, flora and fauna, and cool stuff to build, craft, mine and gather.
With a laid back soundtrack and gorgeous pixel art visuals, Craftlings contains a retro inspired world that I cannot wait to escape to when it is finished, and it will definitely appeal to fans of gentle mind-bending strategy and the sort of games we enjoyed in a bygone era.
Craftlings is coming to PC. Impressions based on a trip to Raw Fury HQ, travel and accommodation were paid for by the publisher.
