Banished

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☑ Very good ☐ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☐ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☑ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☑ Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☑ Old Fashioned ☐ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☑ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☑ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☐ Average ☐ Long ☑ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☑ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☑ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☑ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10

Great game with good mods, Wish the developers had stuck with it. This cold have been the Best of this Genre.

I need MORE!!!!! Really love the game, keep trying to find others like it and nothing scratches that banished itch. Really fim game, 10/10 DO recommend.

My town was going great, then the citizens running my farms and fishing and hunters all decided to die within a year and food was scarce because the teenagers could not run the show so the whole place nearly collapsed. In a nutshell this is Banished, what is a peaceful calm game with addictive soothing music is also a savage beast at the same time and will mercilessly punish your tiny world. The game is awesome and there is no denying that, masterfully created by ONE MAN! I still can't believe it. I do strongly suggest you look at some 10 minute youtube tutorial videos before you begin the game just to get a feel for it and to understand how to start a town properly, you wont regret it. The only downside is time, you will probably become addicted to this sandbox style game with no end, just you and your tiny town against the elements to survive, god speed my fellow gamer! 10/10 and then some.

When it comes to city-builders, Banished may not have the same flair as some bigger-budget games, but dang is this game addicting. It's challenging as hell, and improper planning can be super punishing. And yet it almost always feels like I can improve or overcome my mistakes, and I try again. And again. And again....

I'm surprised I haven't left a review of the game. It's good, and it's not easy. There are of course easier options for players getting started, but the challenge of selecting a harsh climate with only a small starting population and resources, then building and managing it over the course of years. People being born, struggling in the cold, getting better clothing and food variety. Then the mods that expand upon it once you've exhausted the vanilla experience, I would have really enjoyed a Banished 2. Well worth the price.

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☐ Good ☑ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☑ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☑ Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☑ Old Fashioned ☐ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☑ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☑ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☑ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☑ Short ☐ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☑ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☑ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☑ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10 Great little game to scratch the city building itch.

Considering this game was out before steam tracked playtime it shows you how old it is. Almost every mid-evil city builder is based on the structure of this game. While Banished is very dated it deserves credit as the first game to bring so many new mechanics to this genre. Then its ability to be modded was second to none and a lot of people learned how mods worked because of this game. As a classic it will always be a 10/10 for me. But with the genre now over ran with carbon copies with updated engines and graphics banished probably falls to a 6/10. Which is saying something great because most games that are 10+ years old don't hold up that well. To this day banished is still being ripped off and rebuilt by everyone who can code and wants to do a mid evil city builder. Just remember the roots and that it started with banished. (well it started off the current generation)

Probably one of the best games in the Genre, easy to learn, hard to master

Good gameplay, nice graphics. Enjoyable.

This game is not for the casual players, like me. Even swimming in mods, I struggled. I've put over 1000 hours in CiV V, but that did not help me at all. You'll be lured in by an easy first two years. Nice growth, crops and resources plentiful, then BAM everyone is starving and you're frantically trying to micromanage everything, but it's no use. You F-ed up and now everyone is dying and all you can do is try again. Only to have the same thing happen again making you rage quit, thinking you'll never play that stupid game again. But you will, because it's such a cute, fun game and you really want to be able to make a city that's stable and prosperous. I still haven't managed that... While my review might sound negative, I think this game deserves a thumbs up because I keep coming back to it, so it has to be good even though I can't play it, right? Maybe I'll manage it this time?

Great game. needs more maps, bigger maps....... Some mods do not work, but there is a host of them out there that do work

great game, if you eventually find vanilla to easy there are mods. where banished 2 lol

As someone who went straight into the mods and never left them, this game still holds up very well after adding 200+ mods. Base game is a good challenge and the mods do not fully take away from that.

Banished markets itself as a simple and straightforward management game. There are no tech trees or imposing spreadsheets of data to keep track of, just resources, buildings, and villagers. Unfortunately, the developers failed to create strategic depth within these restrictions. Most of the challenge in this game comes from a few counterintuitive mechanics. For example, having too many available houses will impede villagers from having children. Why does that happen? Definitely not because it makes for an interesting challenge. I suspect it's more of an unintended consequence of how that system was programmed that the developers never sought to fix. In the end, Banished is as shallow as a puddle. It may scratch that management game itch for a couple hours, but once you've learned how it works, there is nothing left to do other than toil away endlessly.

Extremely re-playable, deceptively complex enjoyable game.

I got up feed my sweet dog, but forgot to eat myself.... My people need me!!! This game is addictive....three thumbs up if I had a third thumb. Trying to learn by my mistakes like real life. Great game folks.

Nice colony/city builder. Easy to learn but gets tougher to manage as the town grows.

Banished is honestly worth making a fun afternoon or two of solid city building that is relaxed an immersive.

✅ Recommended – 94.7+ hours played A peaceful town-building game where peace slowly turns into panic. Banished is all about managing a small, vulnerable population through harsh winters, crop failures, and resource scarcity—without any combat. It’s not about expansion; it’s about survival and smart planning. Expect slow pacing, quiet tension, and that moment when 12 villagers freeze to death because you forgot to build enough coats. Chill but brutal. If you like strategy with no hand-holding, it’s a gem.

very difficult. good to know i would suck as god. good practice as a project manager. 10/10

Banished dropped me into the wilderness with barely a tutorial- just a handful of villagers and a dream. Naturally, my first few towns collapsed spectacularly. But once I got the hang of managing food, firewood, and the ever-doomed aging population, it was incredibly rewarding to watch my little medieval settlement grow. Challenging yet oddly cozy, Banished’s rustic vibe makes even the toughest survival moments feel charming. If you enjoy city builders that don’t hold your hand (and might slap it away), this is a gem worth trying.

What starts as a seemingly basic medieval city builder quickly turns into a battle to balance and grow your village while keeping your people alive. Its so easy to get complacent, and just when you think your doing great everyone dies from something you didn't see coming. Honestly far more challenging then you'd expect, but also very rewarding.

Got recommended to me by a friend. I wanted a game I could play while watching a movie on the other screen or listening to podcasts, and I also have a bad habit of enjoying playing on hardest difficulty, not many games that will let you do both and still enjoy it. Ended up actually getting all the achievements. There is a learning curve but its not too steep and for the most part, if you remain calm you'll be able to manage and thrive. Remaining calm is key because mistakes in this game can quickly snowball a lot faster than in other colony sims. I also love that the controls/UI are not overly and needlessly complicated. Gameplay is actually quite meditative once you get used to it. This game is not for people who panic a lot but for those who enjoy getting into a flow state.

This game is great! Takes some time to understand the mechanics, but it's a lot of fun and almost calming. Watching all of my people run around, listening to the fantasy tavern music and hearing my farm animals puts me in a meditative state. One of the only games that I actually loved hitting all of the achievements. Great job on this game.

It's a fantastic game! Relaxing, but still very challenging. When all goes your way, suddenly a tornado is sweeping across your village. You have to create a balance between producing food and develop and grow your village. Grow to fast and everyone will starve, but if you take it to slow, your villages will die of old age and you havent a next generation to support the villiage. This game is a must play! :)

Well, what can I say? If you are into watching ant sized people do hard work, you've come to the right place. They will hunt for food, or gather it. They will cut trees and gather stone. It's just great fun.

Takes some getting into it if you've never played a survival city builder. But it's good fun for the most part and once you get the hang of it and your villages more or less thrive, it's really nice.

Be warned that the devs abandoned this game years ago, that's not a bad thing because the game is in a finished state and mods fix whatever holes were left over, but that is something you should know going in. This is the hardest city builder you will ever play. You will be forced to restart dozens of times before you finally get things right. Dozens of people will die for seemingly no reason and it will make you very mad. But it's fun, the challenge keeps me coming back once or twice a year and I would recommend it. Banished goes on sale in the summer and winter, pick it up for like 6 bucks and you won't regret it.

It's more bare bones than Knights and Merchants which came out in like 97. It looks good though. Unplayable without mods like RedKetchups. People will say it has no goals, but it actually has Steam achievements, those are your goals. I think one is have a population of 1,000 or something. Yeah good luck with that, never achieved it, always get too bored because they take too long to populate (even with mods). Most of your time spent in this game is building surplus homes and generating surplus food because the population system is bursty and cumbersome. About 15 unskilled Nomads will show up whenever they want and of course you need them, they instantly empty the granary out to arbitrarily fill their homes up, assuming you built homes for them, which is unlikely, this is probably why the Boarding House exists, but it isn't intuitive whatsoever. They come uneducated and can't be taught, so they come with a downside, as educated citizens produce way more, carry more and work faster with tools. Then the other problem is that you have a finite amount of family in a house, they don't move out until adulthood and they need a proper empty house available or they never move out, the parents stop having kids because the house is full, everyone dies of old age in the same house because you didn't build 3 separate houses in advance for all of them to move into. For every house you build, you need at least 3 more to grow from it, so you can imagine the time and space implications of that. They can't move into boarding houses in the meantime, those are basically reserved for homeless and nomads. Another problem you will run into is the Health meter. It's obvious you need a Herbalist at some point, but what the game doesn't tell you is that when your population grows, like lets say you hit 70 pop, one Herbalist building is not sufficient enough for this amount of people and the only way you'll know is when you suddenly notice you have 2 hearts and 0 herbs in storage, then you fall into a downward spiral of bad health because you need a completely new Apothecary, far away from your current one then need to wait for them to walk all over the map then have the goods transferred alllll the way into your storages. If you don't know what you're doing with markets when this happens it's most likely GG because of the jacked up supply chain. You can't even have supply chains without mods that add more stockpile and market types.

Banished is a deeply immersive and challenging city-building strategy game that places players in control of a small group of exiled settlers striving to survive and thrive in a harsh, unforgiving wilderness. Developed by Shining Rock Software and released in 2014, the game has earned praise for its uncompromising focus on survival mechanics and resource management, setting it apart from more traditional city simulators by emphasizing the fragility of life and the constant struggle against environmental and economic adversity. Rather than offering a sprawling empire to build, Banished demands careful planning and foresight as every decision can have significant consequences on the wellbeing of your population. At its core, Banished tasks players with managing the daily lives of settlers who must gather food, build shelter, and maintain warmth through brutal seasons that affect crop yields, hunting, and overall survival. The game’s pacing is deliberately slow and methodical, encouraging patience and strategic thinking rather than fast expansion. Resources such as wood, stone, iron, and food must be constantly gathered and rationed, with no safety nets for shortages. This scarcity creates an ever-present tension that permeates the gameplay; failing to prepare adequately for winter or a poor harvest can quickly spiral into disaster, wiping out entire communities. One of the game’s standout features is its realistic simulation of individual settlers, each with their own needs, occupations, and life spans. This micro-management adds emotional weight to the gameplay, as players develop attachment to their citizens, witnessing their growth from children to elders and feeling the impact of deaths from starvation or exposure. The lack of combat or enemy threats shifts the focus entirely to environmental challenges, making Banished a pure survival city-builder. The world itself is procedurally generated, providing new landscapes and resource distributions each playthrough, which enhances replayability and forces players to adapt their strategies accordingly. Graphically, Banished opts for a minimalist, utilitarian aesthetic. The visuals are functional and clear but not flashy, focusing on clarity of information over spectacle. The isometric perspective gives a good overview of your settlement, and buildings and citizens are easily distinguishable, allowing players to track progress and identify issues at a glance. Sound design is subtle, featuring ambient nature sounds and the quiet bustle of settlers at work, which enhances the feeling of isolation and immersion without overwhelming the senses. The game’s learning curve is steep, and newcomers may find the initial stages unforgiving as they grapple with balancing food production, housing, and health care. However, this challenge is also what makes Banished so rewarding; success feels earned and hard-fought. There is no hand-holding or scripted events—only the player’s skill at managing resources and making tough decisions can ensure survival. The modding community has also contributed to extending the game’s lifespan, offering additional content and tweaks that enhance the base experience. One criticism of Banished is that, after prolonged play, the gameplay loop can become repetitive, as the core tasks of gathering and building remain largely unchanged. The absence of combat or political dynamics means the game focuses narrowly on survival, which might limit appeal for players seeking a more varied or narrative-driven experience. Additionally, the UI can sometimes feel clunky, with some information buried under menus, requiring players to develop their own systems for tracking needs and resources. In conclusion, Banished is a compelling and challenging city-building survival game that strips the genre down to its essentials, offering a sobering and rewarding experience about the precariousness of life in the wilderness. Its focus on realistic resource management, environmental hardship, and the lives of individual settlers creates a uniquely intimate and strategic gameplay loop. While its austere presentation and difficulty curve may not appeal to everyone, players who enjoy thoughtful, slow-paced strategy games with meaningful consequences will find Banished a deeply satisfying and memorable experience. Rating: 8/10

Honestly a very poorly made game, path finding is atrocious, people will starve when there is plenty of food, the queue for tasks is broken, etc. Go buy Farthest frontier instead of this, it is a much better game that is similar to this but a hell of a lot better.

As it is, no I wouldnt recommend it. You have to fix the issues with frequent zooming and scrolling lock during gameplay. Suddenly the screen will zoom out or in, or scroll down if in a help menu, and no matter what I do it either locks in full zoom out, or keeps scrolling down the menu. It would be a nice game otherwise.

It's like Age of Empires and Sim City had a love child. Chill for the most part and can play at my own pace. Easy to save and come back to another time.

Simple yet challenging game of survival. Well worth the money

Fundamentally simple yet challenging city builder.

mods make this game fantastic for those who like a slower city builder i thoroughly enjoy this game.

Chill game that you can sit back and relax on.

Thought I could build a village. Turns out I can’t manage 6 people and a potato. Everyone died because I didn’t know how firewood works. Then I tried again. This time we had food. But I forgot tools. So they punched rocks until their hands fell off. Built a school. All the kids got educated. Died smarter, still hungry. 7.4/10

This is the nightmarish tale of a man who went hiddin in the woods to build a hut, hunt, gather and die in peace, but was stalked by wife and kids and now there are hundreds of mouths to feed, forcing said man to break his back on crops and quarries again. Or that is the story I tell in my head at least. Banished is a bit of a mixbag. Reviews claim it is "difficult/punishing", which is simply false. It has (purposefully?) hidden, unintuitive mechanics and that's it. The atmosphere is kinda pretty and calm, the UI is... raw QT-like? It breaks immersion. It lacks objective or any sense of progression. All 24 buildings start unlocked, you just decide placement and prioritize resources spending. There are 3 difficulty settings for the weather, 2 terrain types and 3 starting conditions. I guess 99% of dev effort went into food, with 8 crop, 3 animal and 2 fruit types (in 8 skins), plus gather/hunt food split into protein/grain/veggie/fruit groups ([url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1240940356]check this guide[/url]). Achievements are nice and not very troublesome. Ran fine on Linux via Proton, thanks Valve! Banished is decently fun (once you get the hidden mechanics). I will also commend this engine, being a one-man-job and better optimized than many AAA ones. It is richly modded and has community challenges spoadically, adding to the replayability.

A laughable, yet sad, reskin of the basic concepts of Anno 1602.

The ultimate in soggy peasant 'Ort' simulation. Prepare to molder down the back of the hedgerow for 15 years.

This game is just a little too micro-managey for me.

Terrible game. Everyone froze, then starved. 10/10.

Very relaxing city builder. Love this game.

This is a fun and cozy game. I recommend it.

Half of my town burned down, great game.

the game is good but ... abandoned ware ...

The blueprint for city builders

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