FARTHEST FRONTIER

A challenging survival city builder from the developer of Grim Dawn

- Christopher Livingston

I've played plenty of medieval survival city builders before, and the one I'm playing now is from the makers of bleak apocalyptic ARPG Grim Dawn. So I feel like I'm being practical, not pessimistic, when one of the first things I tell my citizens to build in my little town is a graveyard.

It turns out to be the right move. Farthest Frontier doesn't take its time putting my little peasants in mortal danger: they've only just started hammering together their first building, the town hall, when one of them is attacked by a vicious wolf. I'm pleased to see they're a tough group, quickly swarming the predator and killing it, but that's just the beginning of the threats.

GRIM PAWNS

There's another wolf attack, followed by a bear rampaging through the town and causing the villagers to hide in their homes until the one guy who owns an ax deals with it. And then the diseases begin rolling in. Dysentery. Scurvy. Typhoid. Cholera. Worms. Worms! Most survive after I quickly build a healing hut, but a couple of them perish. Also, and it brings me no pleasure to say this, but when I built a fence around my carrot field to keep deer from eating my vegetables, I forgot to install a gate, and one of my citizens who was weeding the ground got trapped inside and, ironically, starved to death. Starving to death on a farm. It's not a good omen for the town of Grimville.