I played the Pioneers of Pagonia demo during the Steam Next Fest of October 2023. It’s been so long since I did any Bob the Builder type of games without actually being a Bob that I thought I should give it a shot. The banner for it actually gave me a more cartoonish feel of the game, but it wasn’t like that at all. Still, it was all pretty chill.

Pros:

  • Relaxing town builder

Cons:

  • Can’t move buildings around
  • No speeding things up

Not counting the short gameplay of Fabledom that I’d played for a little while sometime back (it’s expanded since I first played it, by the way, so my review on it might not count for much anymore), I don’t think I’ve played a city builder since…honestly, Age of Empires? And I don’t mean the more recent ones either, I’m talking about the old school Age of Empires. The one where you could use Photon Man and Big Daddy as cheats and get these OP attack forces.

They usually ended up screwing me over on escort missions, but y’know.

AoE games are city builders, right? Going through all that I’m kind of doubting myself now, but I think so?

Anyway, back to Pioneers of Pagonia, I think I find this kind of city builder a lot more relaxing than others I’ve probably seen floating around on Steam. The main reason is because despite there being guard towers, I don’t think you have to worry about any combat. Not only that, but you don’t have to constantly keep up with food resources for the townsfolk to survive.

So while there is some sort of strategic positioning for the buildings, nothing really bad comes out of any placement or how many buildings you make of what, as long as you have enough resources and people willing to work.

It’s quite a bit more relaxing than those of Age of Empire games, but if the game continues like this outside of the demo, I can also see how it might become stale after a while with just completing objectives given to you and no real purpose of completing them except to progress the game.