Virtual Villagers is a PC game involving the strategic management of a small tribe of villagers as they struggle to survive on a new island and solve its puzzles.
Virtual Villagers is a unique type of PC game that gives the illusion of running a village simulation in real time. The basic idea is to manage a small tribe of villagers, helping them survive and ultimately unravel the mysteries and puzzles on their small island. Villagers will move around and perform tasks more or less on their own initiative, although they will need some assistance and encouragement, especially at the beginning.
The story is all but non-existent. A disaster struck their previous home and only a few villagers managed to make it to a new island, Isola, to start over. This is not a game to play for plot, but for gameplay, which, although it is not really very deep, is simple and strangely compelling. Picking up a villager and dragging him over certain areas will reveal hints about that area in the form of a reaction given by the villager. Dropping him in certain areas will induce him to perform a relevant task. For instance, the first goal is to keep the village from starvation. Dropping a villager onto a source of food will induce him to forage, although it may take several tries for him to gain enough skill at it to keep doing it.
Skills
Villagers can learn in five different skill areas: Farming, Building, Researching, Healing, and Breeding, and they can gain three levels of achievement at each skill: Apprentice, Adept, and Master. Villagers will gradually gain skill automatically as they practice a skill. Higher levels will allow the villager to perform the task better and faster. Sometimes a Master in a skill is necessary to fulfill a puzzle. There are also two levels of six different areas of research to fulfill, which often unlock various abilities or puzzles.
Once starvation is no longer an issue, as long as the village is set up to replenish its population, it can more or less be left alone for long periods of time and it will sustain itself. Some villagers will gather enough food to keep the food supply increasing, and the other villagers will research, mend huts, or wander around, depending on their skills. In other words, the game can be played in minutes a day if that is all the time one has, despite the real-time continuous nature of it. It can also be slowed down to half speed or sped up to twice the normal speed or even paused, depending on how much one wishes to accelerate the process.
While the village will run on its own, it will not necessarily be very efficient. This is because even when a villager is set to a task and has enough skill that he won't wander off due to that, he still may wander off periodically to eat, relax, exercise, look curiously at something, do laundry, or any of a number of things that do not actually add a meaningful contribution to the village. Fortunately, villagers can be interrupted in these other tasks with no apparent loss of village function and placed back on their primary task. Furthermore, they usually walk much more slowly than they can be dragged across the island, so as long as they are not carrying anything, they can be taken back to a task's point of origin to continue it.
Graphics
The graphics are simple and not terribly realistic sometimes, but they are also cute and effective. For example, small children run around very fast, and as a villager ages, he slows down. Children are also just smaller counterparts of their adult selves. Both of these effects work surprisingly well at conveying the process of growing. The only problem is that it is rather difficult to tell when a villager has become elderly, because they look exactly the same as when they became adult, at age fourteen, but they just move more slowly.
The exception to the speed rule is villagers who like running: they move as fast as children all the time, because they are running. They are useful for doing long range jobs like watering crops because they move faster than the other adults. Little things like these likes and dislikes can have a significant effect on the way they act and react. A villager may refuse to gather a particular type of food because he dislikes it, or dislikes its environment.
Comparison
The real-time aspect of this simulation actually has similarities to internet or PC simulation/strategy games with a real-time resource collection component. Virtual Villagers, while it has an internet ranking board for various statistics, has no other online component and is completely one-player. The most similar type of game, however, would probably be RTS (real-time strategy), except that most of those games involve military strategy and defense against an opponent, whether computer or human. This game is completely peaceful and has no opponent. It also seems to have no resource limit, in the sense that the village could theoretically sustain itself indefinitely, once it has achieved the necessary level of farming competence.
This is a deceptively simple-looking game: it does not have near the same level of complexity as an RTS game such as Age of Empires. However, it has a rather complex set of connected goals to accomplish. One task builds on another, and the village gradually accomplishes ways to improve its existence. It may take quite a few days to complete, but much of that time is spent letting the villagers do their tasks and keep their island running on their own. For those who like simulations but hate having to manage every detail, or those who like real-time strategy but hate fighting, this game may be an excellent choice.
The publisher, Last Day of Work, has produced a second chapter to the villagers' existence which continues in the same theme with a different part of the island and different puzzles. There is also a plant-growing simulation, Plant Tycoon, and a fish-breeding simulation, Fish Tycoon, both also real-time and having some thematic connections to Isola, the island where the Villager games take place.
