Banished is a game about exactly what the name implies – you and a group of people are banished from your homeland, forced to stake it out in the wilds and carve out a new home. You only have the clothes on your back and whatever supplies you can pull in a cart.

Survival is essentially the main focus of the game as the people are literally your main resource. You cannot get more settlers magically by just placing houses, like in other city builders. The people you get in the beginning are your foundation for your new settlement.

Each person has their own individual needs and each family will eventually populate the town with children, which eventually grow up to become whatever you want to make of them. Keeping your people alive is crucial to the survival of your

You can assign roles for each individual person, whether they be general laborers, farmers, builders, woodcutters, fishermen, and so on. People will grow old, have extended families, and eventually die. You have to not only manage your people, but how you gather resources as well.

One of the things that Banished does that really excites me is that it sets in check real world survival conditions. You have to stock up on enough firewood or coal to survive the winter’s cold. This also means you have to manage your food stockpiles as well.

You also have to take into consideration of the natural ecosystems within the game world. No two environments will be the same so the strategy you used in one town can’t be used on another. All of the resources within the game world behave the same way that they do in real life.

If you start to heavily focus on fishing as a source of food for your town, you could eventually lead to overfishing and the extinction of the local supply of fish. This would lead to your villagers starving to death. The same can be said from growing crops in a monoculture.

Rotating crops in your fields will be a necessity as any good farmer knows, growing crops in a monoculture leads to the complete depravation of the nutrients in your soils. This will also lead to your people starving and the end of your colony.

There are many aspects to the game that are also very interesting as well, like the ability to accept nomads into your town, or the ability to barter any of your goods with merchants.

Coming from this, since Banished is a back to basics sort of survival game, there is no concept of currency in the game. All trading is done with real world goods and trading surpluses must be done intelligently.

Overall I’m very excited for Banished, it looks like a wonderful take on the city building genre with its extreme focus on survivalism and the importance of family and balancing what we take from the environment.

You can view a trailer for the game below:

You can also check out Shining Rock Software’s official website here. Banished is set for a release later this year, but we’ll keep you guys posted.