What would happen if you merged together a city builder set up with roguelite resource management? You’d get something similar to Dawnfolk – an excellent turn-based city builder challenge from Solo Developer Darenn Keller. Streamlined into a succinct, speedy story mode, or sprawling out in endless or open world mode, Dawnfolk offers an engrossing and intriguing experience for players.
The premise of Dawnfolk revolves around darkness and a dark sprite spreading across the land. You team up with Lueur – a light fire sprite who will help combat the spread of darkness, allowing you to expand your city. Dawnfolk is a tile based city builder that requires light to illuminate and expand beyond your home base and that means with every turn (day) you can choose to illuminate a new tile so long as you have enough light resource to do so. This means a new tile can be uncovered and built upon and what you can build depends on the terrain. It could be mines for mountains, woodchoppers in forests, crops in grasslands, or tents and homes. You can also build ships on water or specialist buildings on desert sands too. These all contribute to the balance of expansion versus resource churning as the more you build, the more resources you’ll need to keep the city alive.
Alongside light, the other big resources you’ll need are food and manpower. Each building type will deplete or gain these and if you run out of food, you’ll starve and lose. To keep building you’ll need to generate material but that takes manpower, which needs food to keep going. This means plotting out in your limited landspace what buildings will help you stay afloat. Buildings do better when they are placed near related buildings so putting a farm in the centre of cropfields will double their yeild. A tavern does the same for manpower. Getting that all to work in the space you’ve got is a mini puzzle in itself. Many buildings can also be upgraded using science, which you can generate by upgrading your home tile. This makes a farm even more powerful, or can turn tents into homes which generate more manpower. You’ll need to pay for science late game with your resources but its wise to do so as it means you can be more efficient with less space.
In story mode Dawnfolk centres around the battle against the darkness. This means whenever it rains, the evil dark sprite will return and unleash dark storms – tornadoes that spread across your city. Each tile it touches requires cleansing and this costs light. Every time a new storm occurs it’ll require more and more light to banish and its this balance of expansion vs keeping a reserve of light that will drive you early game, whilst expanding to conquer dark monoliths and reduce the power of storms becomes the late game charge. Whenever you go into battle, chop down forests, fish for food, or battle random orcs and golems – you’ll be taken into a short microgame. These involve shooting and aiming like an Undertale battle, or swiping your sword to deflect hits. They are usually over in 10 seconds and add a jaunty flair without slowing you down. I didn’t find them a chore but if you do, there is a science unlock to automaticallyplay the microgames for you.
Whilst there are only a few resources and building types to consider, Dawnfolk keeps it interesting in other ways. Random encounters or rare tile types will appear such as spooky forests that can turn your people into zombies. You can befriend or slaughter other tribes, but equally they can stab you in the back too. These are tiny subplots to the main experience but it makes the world feel lived in and not stale.
The other huge plus for Dawnfolk is the variety of game modes. Story mode has various difficulty levels to unlock, making the storms harder to cope with. Then there is Puzzle Mode which gives you an empty world and/or certain resources to make the most efficient production line of a specific resource. This was oddly tricky sometimes to get gold scores in, but very rewarding to wrestle with. Then there are special missions where some of the ground rules are tweaked, an open world mode to build however you like without darkness constraints, and an endless mode that offers a huge map to build on. Each mode twists the ideas of Dawnfolk into something engaging, rewarding, but also usually quite streamlined and succinct. You can battle across the world in well under an hour for each scenario or story chapter, and then have a longer, harsher experience on harder difficulties if you want to. Its turn-based nature is incredibly helpful too as you can ask the game to pause before each day moves forward so you can plan each move carefully. Play at your own pace, or zoom through it – its up to you.
I have very little to critique about the game. It is addictive, speedy, gives visual feedback on what you are doing that feels clear and easy to understand, and there is plenty of replayability too. If you aren’t a fan of pixel art, this might not convert you to it but I liked the retro pixel art style. It reminded me of a rose tinted Populous graphically. If you want to tackle a roguelite city builder (no permadeath here) to survive ever higher stakes in a shorter gameplay sessions – Dawnfolk is a great recommendation.
Review copy provided by the developer. Dawnfolk is out now on Steam.
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