A fun, addictive and a bit hard "City builder" game. tl;dr: I highly recommend despite the Engrish and difficulties of planning and resources gathering since it keeps the game engaging enough to manage these effectively.
First of all, the dev seems to be Japanese and having a somewhat understandable Engrish translation its a godsend, even though there are still some broken string here and there, but not enough to not understand much of what you need to do or what construction does.
Second the premise of the game its really simple, build houses, grow population, keep your people bellies full and improve their livelihoods by making coats, rugs, alcohols, sweets and of course much needed firewood to stay warm. You have a "Culture Level" that will unlock new buildings and harvestable resources as you increase this level, and objectives a fairly simple, population up to a certain point, x amount of buildings, x amount of port "quest" requests. For every newly constructed building (1 per), for every birth, for every dock (not confuse it with port) request fulfilled, for every achievement and using a special food to ark factory, you will get "ARK" a currency used to unlock new buildings and supposedly to build them (It takes 1 per newly placed building or one square of road, but if you build anything with 0 ARK there is no issues), early on you get enough to get you village going but it will become a huge grind later on (around culture level 4/5 and up) so knowing when to use and when to build its important a long with keeping those generations up.
Third, there is resource gathering in this game, the 2 more important ones are Grass (Farming uses A LOT of this) and Wood (Firewood its the basic power for keeping houses warms and for some factories) since these are the most used for keeping villagers fed and warm. Then other 3 early resources are mushrooms (important for food, fishing and hunting), herbs (for food, farming and cooking) and Stones (Construction, homes and roads use it a lot). There are more resources after this that are unlocked as your city prosper (namely Clay, Iron, Gold, Copper, Crystal and Silver). Farming/Ranching its a must with a LOT of variety and you can later make them into a LOT of different types of foods with factories near your homes. As a caveat, some managing of Rocks, Clay and the 2 types of Mountains its necessary since these resources are "limited" in a sense that its difficult to come across them if you exhaust your entire island of them, there are some structures that will let you make more of these but it requires a rare material (Crystals) and they are dangerous to use (Exploding underground water for clay, falling Meteors for stones to name a few), the other material that needs managing its Trees, you can plant more with a special worker but it consumes a lot of grass, also Grass grows almost anywhere but most notably near trees, herbs and mushrooms only grow near trees.
Fourth, food managing its deceptively simple but hard to properly manage, if you explode your population you will run into a lot of food/firewood related problems so striking a balance between getting more food sources and building new houses its a must, luckily you get a counter for how much food you have in your homes (A good rule of thumb its keeping more than half of it full, lower and there will be problems in the short/long run) and Firewood (If there isn't enough more food its wasted since they are cold, also a counter for it with the same rule as food, more than half). Later on another culture level, once you build a new building you will get the food Storage counter to help with keeping the balance, and the "Enviromental" counter which its something like how happy your villagers are with the extra goods (Alcohol, sweets, clothes, rugs, tools) and nearby buildings (Like parks, wells, fountain and some other unique buildings with extra effects), the more you have, the longer lived your villagers will be.
Fifth, Planning/Zoning its a learned skill and not something you will get on your first island, it will take a decent amount of practice to know what works best and what doesn't (ProTip, Carriers in range of BOTH houses and food storages/factories for best effect. Protip2 place Food Factories in front, storage road storage or tools/clothes/firewood factories behind food factories and Farms behind storages for a well managed supply chain)
Six, there is no combat danger to your villagers but there are a lot of wild animals or "Pests" since they will steal from your farms and storages if you leave them alone, having enough hunters covering a wide range its necessary to control these or you will have a bad time.
Now for the cons:
- Villagers dying its a pain since you will need to assign new ones back to their workplaces, but there is 2 tools to deal with this, early on you can click on the death announcement of a villager to immediatly select+go to the workplace to place a new one and Later on there are buildings and Upgrades that allow auto recluiting when someone days and there is available villagers in the work pool. Another problem its building too far away from your houses will make it harder to recluit new workers to those sites, and being that far away makes it more dangerous since they can't reach their homes fast enough to get warm and eat food.
- Fire, it comes out of nowhere and can cause a lot of problems where almost every villager comes running looking for water to extinguish the fire, the only recommendation its placing wells in a good number of places so they don't have to run that far.
- Construction its a pain since there is only one button to forcibly assign constructors, otherwise i believe it either works by who's nearer or the order in which you set the build order, early on it makes it difficult to place roads because of this (You either place long roads that might only employ one villager, i haven't truly checked this yet, but takes a lot of time to construct and get the materials to the construction or do short roads but it takes a lot of people from the constructors pool)
- Warehouse/Storage range its not clear, so you might have some situations where you lose resources because it was too far and the alternative its building railroads (same situation as roads) to move from warehouse to warehouse (and this comes with their own unique problems, like not properly planning your warehouse space, taking a lot of space from place to place reducing expansion of your homes, etc). There is balloon carriers to manually select which resource to move between warehouses but it requires a lot of fuel and takes a lot if its too far.
