There’s a confidence to Manor Lords that belies its one-person development, and what’s there can be spellbinding, but it’s a pastoral idyll that still needs significant development.
Yesterday, in between bouts of Manor Lords, I popped down the road to do some food shopping, and bought bread, milk, vegetables, and some other things, then walked home. It took me about 30 minutes all in all, and the whole time I never questioned whether there’d actually be food in the shop when I got there. I didn’t think about whether they’d had a good enough harvest to keep their stores full during the winter. I just popped in and popped out, squeezing a fundamental part of my daily subsistence into a lunch break. How much we now take for granted.
Manor Lords has made me think about this because it’s a game that pulls just getting by sharply into focus. It’s a settlement-building game about the daily toil of living off the land and slowly, gradually, bending it to your will. It’s a game about establishing something from nothing, and living in small villages alongside, and very much in view of, the other families who reside there. It’s a game about crop rotation and people coming together for harvest time, to feed each other, or to help clothe each other – and eventually, to arm and protect each other. Manor Lords is a window into what life was like in the mediaeval era.
