There’s a moment once the violence and destruction is over when everything is calm, or at least feels that way if you’re looking in from outside rather than from the heart of things, trying to figure out how many appendages are still attached and which bits are distressingly leaky. When the damage is big enough, like to the whole world, that calm may last years as the survivors work on reassembling their lives and something resembling civilization. Doloc Town sprung up when a group of survivors settled near the ruins of the bridge where their train broke down, scavenging it for parts and building a small community. Survivor-trauma aside it was a good life for a while, until the continually deteriorating world blocked off the easy access routes and trade dried up. Now it’s a town in decline, in desperate need of the farmer/crafter sort who’s ready to move in and take on all jobs, rebuilding everything they can get their hands on as they settle into their cozy new rural life.
Farming And Crafting From The Ruins Of The Old World
Doloc Town is a farming/crafting/adventure game that’s released on Steam in Early Access today, and this time it’s in chunky-pixel side view form. As a former resident of Doloc Town you’ve finally found your way home, and a helpful villager sets you up with a tent on an unused section of land. It’s not much, granted, but is enough to start with, especially seeing as unlike in survival games there’s no hunger meter requiring regular attention. You will need to sleep at night, and actions such as breaking up rocks and harvesting trees sap an energy meter that requires either sleep or food to refill, but even with no energy left you can still talk to people and explore a bit.
Postapocalyptic Farming Adventure Doloc Town Sprouts Early Access Release Date Trailer
Doloc Town manages to stand out due to both its side-view approach to the genre and its postapocalyptic trashpunk setting.
Like most games of this sort Doloc Town starts off slowly, with a restrictive inventory and no money to expand it, so the best way to begin is by talking to everyone and seeing what they need. It’s easy to get sidetracked by the base building, setting up platforms to hold planting boxes where crops are grown while clearing off the land of trash, rocks, and trees, but once the basic tutorial tasks are done the town is where the plot is. That leads directly to being able to afford an inventory big enough that exploration doesn’t end up needing multiple trips to bring everything back, meaning you’re able to finally relax a little and start enjoying whichever aspect of Doloc Town catches your interest at the moment.
Farming is easy enough, but that needs seeds and those cost money. It also requires growing boxes, each of which only holds a single plant, so that means harvesting trees and rocks. Nicer rocks hold metallic ore, though, so that justifies a trip to the far outskirts of town, and that’s where the slimes and hostile robo-drones live. You can beat on them with a pick or axe but shooting them with a drone of your own is better, and the drone can be set to auto-target so all you need to do is stay out of the way unless you want to handle the aiming and shooting yourself. Doloc Town isn’t straight-cozy but rather cozy-with-teeth, but it still leans towards not forcing the player to deal with twitch-gaming action despite having its share of bullet-hell encounters.
Doloc Town starts off peacefully in a run-down trashpunk town but slowly grows through the adventure to feature huge player-built layouts that see the farm stacked on platforms layered up to the skies, once new tech is unlocked and better crops discovered. Upgraded player drones and weapons take the edge off wilderness exploration, and if that’s still a bit much there are as many days as needed to work the farm and save up for something even better. It’s still Early Access, though, so new maps, automated farming, ranching, and the completion of the story are all coming along later. Even so the current state is currently a lovely chill vibe, with a lo-fi soundtrack and surprisingly atmospheric lighting effects when the evening rolls around. Doloc Town is a dying settlement living off the scraps scavenged from a broken world, but with the assist of a crafting hero it can follow in the long tradition of thriving towns built on and from the wreckage of those who’ve come before.
