Dawnfolk Review - Gamecritics.com

Folk Around And Find Out

HIGH Cute aesthetic. Intuitive, brain-soothing gameplay.

LOW Too chill for its own good.

WTF Some of the marketing is cringe-inducing.

The indie game scene is — and I don’t think this is a controversial thing to say — the healthiest, most interesting and fecund sector of the industry. With the major game studios intent on treading mechanical water and out-glossing one another, anybody craving texture, creativity, innovation, spark, or juice should turn to the individual artists and small collectives for the good stuff. Nearly everything I’ve truly loved from the last five years – at least – has been an indie release.

Indie devs are the freak specialists, the alchemists, the daring vivisectionists fusing together disparate elements with an experimental flamboyance that the big boys lost back in the PlayStation 2 era. The only problem, if we want to call it that, is that there is actually too much good stuff out there, an absolutely tidal glut of noteworthy indie releases. Unshackled from the need for console clearance, indie devs can put their titles online for a (relatively) low cost, potentially finding audience sectors that the megacorps, faceless and vaguely moronic in their glittering arcologies, just aren’t interested in servicing. Thus, the indie scene is an embarrassment of riches and it takes a bit for a title to stand out.

Certainly Darenn Keller, developer of Dawnfolk, managed to bring his game up to a humble yet meaningful level of visibility — mainly through some sorta cute, sorta heavy-handed marketing stuff including an ad on Tumblr (!?!) that playfully references a meme from Supernatural (!?!) and if I write any more about this I will instantly age 1000 years, turn into dust, and my remains will blow away on cosmic winds…

In Dawnfolk, players build and expand a city on a planet imperiled by some sort of supernatural darkness. They’re aided by Lueur, a cute little blossom of flame who looks like something Hayao Miyazaki would doodle on a napkin during a smoke break. Each map is a grid of square tiles, some lit, some dark. Leuer’s job is to light the dark tiles on the frontier, so that players can build structures on them. Every structure affects production in one of four areas – Light, Workforce, Food, and Materials. All four are necessary for a successful city, but players will prioritize some over others depending on their situation.

The central gimmick in Dawnfolk is that many interactions on these tiles entail completing a real-time activity. In order to clear a tile of trees, for example, players play a reflex-based, three-second long woodchopping minigame. I say “central gimmick” but that’s almost overselling it since these minigames are just an embellishment, a little riff that Dawnfolk plays before leaving to explore other elements with its chilled out, near-weightless touch.

Lightness is the operative word with Dawnfolk. It does not ask for epic play sessions. It is not Crusader Kings or Civilization, and any of its maps across its various modes (excluding Endless) can be completed in an hour or less. It took me 60 hours to finish my first playthrough of CKII. I don’t know if I’ve ever finished a game of Civ — has anyone? But I completed Dawnfolk’s entire Story Mode and sampled some of its Puzzle and Curious Expedition maps, in well under ten hours.

This is not a criticism, inherently, as the strategy/civ builder format needs more short stories. I like that a Dawnfolk city’s entire arc resolves in less time than it takes to watch a briskly-paced movie. I also like that each Story scenario adds a twist to the formula, whether it’s the presence of an orc culture on the map, a dragon who demands tribute, or zombie-infested swamps. My particular favorite was a scenario about hunting for treasure in an archipelago (mostly water) which forced creative layouts to maximize production across several little landmasses.

So short is good, being accommodating is good, simplifying is good, but at some point a game that smooths off every rough edge and element that could generate friction, loses mechanical texture. Dawnfolk is too relaxed.

I am not a brilliant strategist, but I didn’t lose a single map in the Dawnfolk campaign – I didn’t even come close. Not a single bead of sweat crossed my brow, not a scintilla of anxiety passed through my system at any point. Even the aforementioned twists on specific maps don’t crinkle the strategy in big ways. Ultimately, every city felt like every other city, with the same buildings more or less doing the same things. It seemed almost impossible to make a real mistake.

…And all of that is fine, in a vacuum. Dawnfolk is pleasant, but nothing here sets off fireworks. Nothing grabs a player by the ganglia and makes them think about Dawnfolk when they aren’t actively playing it. It’s all breadth and no depth, and there isn’t even enough breadth here to make a single strategy sandwich. Play just one map, and the majority of the overall experience has been revealed.

So, while there was not a single moment of Dawnfolk that was unpleasant, buggy, or painful, there are many indie strategy titles I would recommend before it. I despise that we have to look at the experience of art as a transaction (and it grosses me out to say this) but I want people to know that their money may be better spent elsewhere.

…But then again, it may not.

If Dawnfolk looks cool, give it a try. It is a pared down, chill experience sitting at the crossroads between idle game, puzzle game, and city builder. Going in expecting a full-fat example of any one of these is asking to be disappointed. Expecting it to fully explore the territory it stakes out for itself is also a mistake. But for those who can relax and reign in their expectations, there’s an honest joy to be had.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

— Ben Schwartz

Buy Dawnfolk: PC

Disclosures: This game is developed by Darenn Keller and published by Astra Logical. It is available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 7 hours of play were devoted to the game, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB. The game could fairly be described as “wholesome” with all characters and units (even typically unpleasant creatures like zombies) drawn in cute pixel art. There is combat and death is implied, but little violence is depicted on screen. During hunting minigames, players shoot arrows at animals who do fall over and die, but there is no blood. There is no foul language, no mature themes, and nothing that could typically be called “scary.”

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no spoken dialogue in this game, everything is presented with text. The text cannot be resized, although there is an option for an “HD font” which looks a bit bigger. The most important cues are when a turn ticks over and production occurs for all buildings/tiles — there is a “clock sound” to indicate a new turn, but all tiles also have a visual production animation. That being said, they’re pretty low-key and easy to miss. There is also has a turn-based option so the real-time elements can be completely removed, and this is the mode I recommend in general.