Indietail – Landnama

Landnama is the first game of the indie development studio Sonderland which consists of three dads and close friends from Canada, France and Germany who independently worked on games, such as Core Defense and Blacken Slash, before working on this title together.

United by a desire to make beautiful, minimalist games, Michael, Mario and Mathias, the developers, aspired to create a non-violent rogue-lite survival builder in the form of Landnama.

Developer: Sonderland
Publisher: Sonderland
Genre: Indie, Minimalist, Strategy, Roguelite, Survival, Colony Sim
Release Date: July 31st, 2023
Reviewed on: PC
Available on: PC (Mac, Win, Lin), Mobile (Android, iOS), Xbox, PlayStation, Switch
Copy was provided by the developers.

“In the 9th century, after crossing the sea to settle the uninhabited wilds of Iceland, Norse settlers either found success in their new home or succumbed to the harsh winters. Their fates were recorded for history in the pages of the great book of Landnama” – or so the game states.

Landnama is as I previously mentioned a non-violent rogue-lite survival builder where you set out to set claim to Iceland. You explore the lands, manage time and resources, and hope to survive.

You choose from a bunch of different clans, each with strengths and weaknesses, to settle in one of the six regions of Iceland. To succeed with a settlement, you need to upgrade your settlement’s base of operation from a simple encampment to a Great Hall.

If you succeed in all six regions, you complete a “Saga”, a playthrough so to speak, and can then try a higher difficulty, a Hagalaz – very much Ascension-style.

The base resource in Landnama is “Hearts”. Four times per year, you’ll receive your harvests from all production buildings, and at the end of the year, you’ll lose hearts according to the Winter’s Toll.

The Winter’s Toll is how you’ll lose, btw. If you’re unable to pay the specified amount of hearts, you lose. This amount increases with each passing year, tile explored and building built. The idea is that you need to be careful that it doesn’t out scale you, very much Risk of Rain style.

At the same time, you also want to snowball your economy. You want to explore in different directions to find a possible place to build your sacred sites, production buildings and utilities without possibly impeding the productiveness of other tiles.

Building things, exploring, as well as upgrading your settlement’s centre costs hearts. Once you get a good run going, it feels amazing but sometimes the lands are not generated in your favour, meaning you need to take risks and delay the upgrades aka your win-con which can be rather rough.

Landnama is pretty simple at first glance but when you play it, you just notice how much depth there is in terms of mechanics… It gets hectic at times when you try to manage your resources and not let a big harvest go to waste because of the maximum storage you’ve got.

At the same time, there are decisions to make that influence your short-term or long-term harvests or the way you progress things. At certain intervals, you only are faced with detrimental effects that stop you from exploring or increase your costs.

Personally, when it comes to detrimental effects, I value time over costs, so I always pick the options that lose hearts or increase costs rather than the ones that increase build time or exploration time.

That’s mainly because, at some point in a good run, you have too many resources but you never have too much time. Again, the Winter’s Toll increases with each year, can’t get outscaled.

What if these choices didn’t always correlate to each other and I’d have the choice of increasing the exploration time or destroying a random building? I think that would genuinely increase the play patterns you can go for and it would put you in a bind, choices would be more meaningful.

As it stands, Landnama feels stiff even though it wants to be a roguelike. Yes, it’s hard and it has perma-death to a degree but once you’ve completed one saga, you kinda know how to complete another.

It’s a one-trick pony and while it’s a ton of fun, there is arguably sort of just one way to play the game. Snowball early and upgrade as you go.

The strategic aspect of choosing which settlement to go for first and finding landmarks early on is interesting but aside from that, most runs go similarly. I’d love to see more content. More variables. More ways to play the game and more landmarks to find that actually change how your saga goes.

Inherently, different clans will focus on different aspects of the core gameplay loop: Exploration, Construction or specific Production Buildings.

That’s fine in and of itself but you’re still playing the same game over and over and over again to unlock some of these.

To unlock Raudur, the Cartographers, for instance, you need to complete 20 sagas. That’s a lot of time spent playing the same game with the same buildings, isn’t it?

So, rather than attributing strengths and weaknesses to the clans, what if some of them were limited in how they get resources? Some clans receive resources for exploring, why not limit what buildings they can build to keep stuff fresh?

I get that the game tries to go for a certain level of authenticity with clan names and lore that could very much be real but why can’t we have some more stuff grounded in Norse mythology or fantasy in there to keep the game interesting?

To add to this, I’d love to see a change in the colour palette. If you take a look at Domekeeper, for instance, the core gameplay loop remains the same throughout each run but despite that, the game feels different solely because of varying colour palettes. I think that that could work here, too.

These are my main criticisms of Landnama.

I can see it getting stale, even if I personally am enjoying it a fair bit even after eight hours of gameplay.

So, if the developers add more content, new biomes, new ideas or maybe even a new paint job for biomes that would be incredibly lovely!

Despite these criticisms, I find it to be incredibly enjoyable in terms of what the core gameplay loop has to offer.

I recommend Landnama to people looking for a nice little colony-sim-adjacent roguelike with some amount of strategy and survival aspects. It’s easy to pick up and hard to let go of, and I’m sure the developers will add plenty more to this game based on player feedback.

Given how receptive the developers were to feedback so far and given how much they’ve changed already in the past week since release, I’m sure they’ll try to add some more stuff to keep the game interesting even if you’ve sunk countless hours into it already.

And I’m really looking forward to that!

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.