The Settlings (Demo) - First Thoughts

What is the first thing you think of when you look at this game? Let me guess. Does it feature little guys with green hair?

As soon as I laid eyes on the trailer for this game I knew I was going to enjoy it. Nothing I have seen in years of browsing game sites like Steam, Itch.io and Indie Gala has hit me so directly in the Amigas that I actually had to stop what I was doing and fire up the SteamDeck to download the demo.

Sure enough, as soon as it was installed and I was into the tutorial level I felt the wave of warm fuzzy Commodore-powered goodness. The obvious instant thought is, of course, Lemmings. Heck, the developer even uses a Lemmings tag on the Steam Store page! As you start playing there are also some nods to The Settlers and I felt a tip of the hat to Benefactor in there too.

Obviously this isn't an Amiga game, it's a modern title built in Unity (the horror!) but it is so well executed that you could almost believe you were playing on an Amiga.

The art style is great, with just the right colour palette and pixel perfect renditions of the various objects and buildings that you interact with as you play through. The audio is great too. The little exclamations when you give a settling a tool, and the furious building sounds when structure are going up - that felt like a great throw back to games like the original Warcraft and, again, The Settlers.

Controls-wise, the game is designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard, and whilst I played on SteamDeck I had no issues with the standard template mapping the controls nicely. My only gripe was not always managing to select a settling fast enough, but that was because I was using the triggers for mouse clicks, not the shoulder buttons. Totally my issue and nothing to do with the game at all.

I found the tutorial level to be well rounded, and it introduced me to the mechanics of the game nicely. This is where The Settlings comes into it's own a bit I think You assume you are going to be playing a Lemmings clone but actually it's a fair bit more complex than that. It's Lemmings in so much as you have lil' dudes walking back and forth on a terrain, and you can assign tools to those dudes such as axes for chopping down tress, pickaxes for mining out stone and hammers for building but there is a level of resource management and planning that needs to happen too. 

The nods to Lemmings keep coming too as you get to place statues (that look distinctly like a Blocker Lemmings) that help control the flow of your settlings.

The depth of the game continues on as you realise you have to build homes for more settlings to jump through the floating portal into the level, and that other structures are needed to produce tools. You start to see there is a level of resource management required to get to the end goal which, in the tutorial at least, is to get 5 settlings to the airship.

When you move on to playing the main game, such that it is in the demo, you find there is much more again to explore. More building options, include a Town Hall which expands your options even further. More tools, abilities and utilities to purchase. Farms for harvesting food for various purposes. The ability to train a militia to fight the baddies (watch out for the Dragon Skelly!) and even mana pools for collecting magic to cast spells. I bet if I played on I'd find even more too.

So, as a first thought on this game, it totally drew me in with it's visual stylings and kept me playing with it's brilliant mechanics. It got it hooks in and I wishlisted it straight away.

If you loved playing any of the classic Amiga games I mentioned above, definitely play this. If you don't even know what an Amiga is, go play this game now and later on head over to Lemon Amiga and search up the games. You'll totally see where I'm coming from.