I am going to conclude that this game is broken or designed to be nearly impossible, because my god is this game frustrating. First off, the tutorials are broken so you have no idea how to play the game and are simply thrown in. Secondly, few of the metrics have any labels. My family was using 9.8 wood a day… 9.8 what? Pounds? I needed to know this because we were over harvesting the available fuel wood, and I needed to set collection limits in town. But the collection limits are in tons, and our daily fuel use has no unit. This caused my family to not be able to cook enough food per day, meaning I had to spend more and more money on extra food to prevent starvation. On that, I think it is ridiculous that this so called “not perfect village simulation” mandates each person have 2500 calories. That is very hard to do and the game should allow you to change the metric.
My family started prosperously, albeit with a few minor setbacks due to missing food quota’s and the woman needing medical care. But with the game not informing me on what metrics things like wood are available in, combined with a drought, food yield started declining massively. Not having enough food to sell (combined with not explaining the small business mechanic) led my family to begin to lose money quickly. I increased the quota, which settled that issue, but fuel was still scarce and the following season we missed our food requirement due to the lack of wood. This continued for several more seasons, causing drought and greater food insecurity, along with Fatou getting the flu. Eventually, food stock got depleted and both of my villagers died.
This game is impossible and I did not have a good time playing it. This was my most successful run, not including several runs which failed early. But also I could have just been managing my resources poorly, which is fair enough. not entirely my fault since the game had no tutorial, but certainly eye opening on how hard it is to manage a family- let alone a village. It is certainly a position I wouldn’t want to be in right now. It is challenging, with problems flying at you every minute, which are incredibly hard to manage
I was also very frustrated, as I think most of us were, at figuring out the game. I was especially confused at the small business aspect at first because there was no explanation. Finding the right combinations of the components in the game to keep the villagers alive seemed pretty impossible to me as well.
I think your last comment about how problems were constantly flying at you and that was hard to manage speaks to why systems work best when they are managed by groups. They are way too complex to be managed successfully by one person. You shouldn’t be expected to manage all of those issues and still provide a good life where parts of the system aren’t breaking down and causing suffering.
I agree this game was very frustrating. I wasn’t able to keep either of them alive, and I just felt like giving up by the end. It felt impossible to keep them alive.