City Tales mixes the medieval Manor Lords with Animal Crossing’s calm vibes

Naturally, when you play a city-builder or a strategy game, you expect pressure. In Civilization 7, you oversee the entirety of human history. Manor Lords puts you in charge of a burgeoning but fragile Middle Ages township, while Stellaris taks you with safeguarding the galaxy. But how about something a little more…peaceful? City Tales: Medieval Era is a builder with a cozy twist. Nevertheless, it has some majorly detailed mechanics. And now, it’s also got an early-access release date.

It looks like the standard start to a city-building game: a handful of resources, a few eager citizens, and a sprawling, green meadow. But even from the beginning, City Tales does things differently. Rather than just building amenities and setting them running, you have a small cadre of companions who you need to personally assign to each incipient construction. Occasionally, your pals will ask you to complete quests and objectives, and doing so will increase the amount of production that they generate at the buildings to which they’re assigned.

More significantly, City Tales drops the usual grid mechanics for a free-hand building system – if you want to establish a new settlement within your settlement, you can zone it in whatever shape or size that you want, and your loyal subjects will begin to fill it up. It creates a much more varied, lifelike township, as your people organically adjust the styles of their houses and stores to match your hand-painted outlines.

And the pace of City Tales, compared to some of its contemporaries, is much more leisurely. Rather than scratch out a meager town over dozens of hours, you can go from a barren field to a bustling, medieval metropolis in the space of a single session.

As revealed at the Future Games Show, the City Tales: Medieval Era early-access release date is now confirmed for Thursday May 22. You can already wishlist it, and also try the demo, right here.

Alternatively, try some of the other best strategy games, or maybe the best 4X games available on PC.

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