Farthest Frontier understands the best moments of city-builders are the beginnings
To me, the best moments of a city-building game are always the beginnings, when there’s nothing but potential ahead of you. Things are manageable, the world is unspoiled, the pace is slow. To me, that’s idyllic. And if ever a game understood that, it’s Farthest Frontier.
Farthest FrontierDeveloper: Crate EntertainmentPublisher: Crate EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on Steam Early Access for £25. Full release an estimated 8-12 months away
It’s a game about a group of working class people fed up with being shat on by the rich, in the big city where they live, so they strike out for the literal farthest frontier to make it on their own. It’s that fantasy. The era is the birth of the Industrial Revolution, maybe – it’s not explicitly clear. And that’s how it begins: a dozen people and a caravan and an endless wilderness around them to tame.
What I love about what comes next is how unhurriedly it happens, and how small-scale it continues to be. Farthest Frontier is not about going from dozens to thousands, from village to sprawling metropolis, and that zooming out you then feel as the person in charge. It’s about staying small and staying close to the people you’re caring for. It’s probably wrong to call it a -builder at all but rather a town-builder, because even many hours in, from what I’ve read, settlements are still only a few hundred people big (apparently the game struggles performance-wise past that, but it is Early Access).
This, then, is a game that wants to hold onto that opening moment feeling. In my first hour – three years in the game – I did little more than build four houses, a fishing hut, a hunting lodge, a forager hut, a graveyard, a smoke house and a storage yard. I survived the seasons on a diet of foraged berries and a bit of meat, killed two wolves, had one villager bitten by a bear and die of rabies, and welcomed three new babies to the world. That same bear came back to terrorise my village, forcing everyone to run inside and hide, but it went away again and so my idyllic way of life continued. My settlement is 16 people big.
