$19.99Banished Every harvest decides who survives
A handful of exiles, one cart of supplies, and a wilderness. Banished is a medieval town builder where your people are the only resource: they are born, work, grow old and die, and every harvest matters. No money, no skill trees, no combat. Just you, the seasons, and the slow work of keeping everyone alive.
Is Banished worth it?
Banished is worth it if…
- you like slow, careful planning where the real enemy is a bad harvest
- you want a survival colony sim without combat, raids or enemies
- you enjoy starting over on a fresh map and solving it a new way each time
- you prefer a small, focused builder over a sprawling one, and mods to grow it further
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People are your only resource
There is no currency in Banished and no tech tree to unlock. Everything comes down to the townsfolk: they are born, grow older, work, raise children of their own, and eventually die. Your job is to keep them healthy, housed and fed, and to make sure the population keeps renewing itself. Building a new home is not enough; a young couple has to move in and start a family. Lose too many working adults in one bad winter and the whole town feels it, because every field, forge and fishing dock needs hands. It is a town built entirely out of lifetimes.
Twenty ways to make a living
Every citizen can take up any of twenty occupations: farming, hunting, fishing, blacksmithing, mining, teaching, healing and more. Assigning them is the heart of the game. One more farmer means one fewer woodcutter, and an uneducated worker harvests slower and wastes materials, so a school pays for itself in ways that are easy to miss. You also decide how the town uses its land: replant forests, mine for iron, quarry for stone. Each of those choices claims space you can never build on again. No single plan works on every map, and that is what keeps each town its own puzzle.
A quiet kind of tension
This is a town builder with no enemies. There are no raids and no armies, only weather, hunger, disease and time, and that is exactly its charm. You play at your own pace, laying out roads and fields while snow settles on the rooftops and the forests turn with the seasons. The early years are the sharp end: you are never quite sure the balance of mouths against food stores will hold, and a crop takes months to regrow. Once a town finds its footing, it settles into something calm and steady, the kind of game where an evening disappears before you notice.
Every town starts from nothing
Each run drops a small group of exiles into a new wilderness with only their clothes and a cart of supplies from home. Maps are generated fresh, so the land itself changes the game: one valley is rich in gatherable food, another forces you to lean on trade. Merchants arrive by river and barter for your surplus, and trading is the only way to bring in livestock and new crop seeds. Their long routes can carry illness from abroad, so a hospital before the traders come is a wager worth making. Every map asks a slightly different question, and no two towns answer it the same way.
What should you know before playing?
Can you play it solo?
Yes, Banished is a singleplayer game through and through. You manage the town alone, at whatever speed suits you, and there is no pressure from other players or outside forces. The only company is the occasional merchant arriving by river.
How hard is it to learn?
The basics are simple and the game explains little, which works in its favour: you pick up the mechanics quickly and learn the rest by doing. But the first towns are genuinely tough, and many do not survive past their first century. Expect a few failed settlements before one takes root. That trial and error is part of the appeal.
Is there a lot to do late game?
Honestly, less than the early hours promise. Once a town is stable and you know what works, there is a stretch of smooth sailing, and players who want constant new systems may run out of novelty after a few towns. The modding community is the usual answer: it adds a huge amount of buildings, goods and production chains, and it is a big part of why people keep coming back years later.
Does it run on modest computers?
It is a light, older game by design, with a clean look and modest demands, and it runs comfortably on modest hardware. The focus is on clear systems and readable landscapes rather than heavy detail, which is part of why it has aged so well.
