Rustica
“Give the people what they want and they will… do what they want to do.”
Your Citizens Need You
Rustica puts you in the unique role of a custodian of a Greco-Roman colony. You have land but not much else and it’s up to you to spruce up the place. You’ll need to discover and provide resources for your world and your citizens will interact with it as they see fit, they have free will after all. Watch your world grow over time and with a keen eye for planning and a bit of luck you can sit back and watch your people thrive.
Start Out Small
You’ll need to begin by laying down the foundations. Your citizens can’t build out of thin air so you’ll need to give them the basics like trees and stone and hope they know what to do with it. Each object has requirements called schemas in order to be placed in the world and some need other objects present in specific spots, and it’s up to you to discover how to unlock them.
Plan For the Future
Eventually, some of your citizens will feel the need to specialize and focus on a trade. They’ll become farmers, miners, priests and then some. This will allow them to interact with their world in new ways and this in turn will open up new objects and schemas for your growing community.
A Hero Rises
Once in a while a citizen decides to go on a hero’s quest. Foolish mortals. You can then go and give the hero what they need to finish their quest or don’t mind them because you have better things to do, like making sure that temple gets built over there by those trees.
Sit Back and Watch the Sunset
Tinker and tweak with the world you create and watch your citizens hard work pay off. Or do like Nero and watch the world burn, figuratively.
It’s your world to play with, you decide.
Read More: Best Sandbox Relaxing Games.
ChessCraft
Never play the same game of chess again! ChessCraft is a chess AI sandbox. Create your own chess boards, rules, and pieces. Play against the computer or your friends online, or win loot by playing one of 80 built-in chess boards in adventure mode.
Many chess games already exist, but only ChessCraft allows the player to create such wacky boards, pieces, and rules and immediately play a decent computer opponent.
Create new pieces with any combination of the 8 bishop or rook slides, plus a 7x7 grid of knight-like hops. Create new boards with any enabled or disabled tile up to 16x16. Place promotion rules for any piece, anywhere, or other special tile rules. Create pieces that cannot be captured, or with ranged attacks, or pieces that restrict other pieces from acting. The computer opponent then uses concepts from computer science and graph theory to understand your creations and play against you.
Read More: Best Sandbox Artificial Intelligence Games.
Silk
Very nice game! Hope the developers will update and expand it though
+Huge open world for hours of exploring
+Simple mechanics of gameplay - easy to learn in minutes
+History notes makes journey immersive
+Handful of ways to beat the game
-No background/ambient music so it is pretty quiet
-Some pieces of map are empty
-No marching armies, caravans etc.
– Real player with 34.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Sandbox Exploration Games.
Silk is a compelling adventure strategy experience - not a genre name you see very often, and what a shame. The importance of picking a sensible route can be paramount, the threat of storms, raiders, wild animals and dead ends feel real and intense, and the feeling you get when you realise you have hit a dead end and have to turn back is a marvellous frustration.
It also means the satisfaction you get when you bring a caravan of silk back home is magnificent. The smalls joys of exploring a world in which every step matters, finding special locations, taking hidden treasure and fighting each small battle are immense. The feeling when your advisors reach a high enough skill level to start to really make the most of your surroundings is superb. A great adventure strategy title, definitely worth your time.
– Real player with 14.2 hrs in game
Sink Again
If you want light-weight pirate-y fare with a primitive economic model coupled with a bunch of turn-based mini dungeon crawls and disconnected scenarios that have you starting from scratch after each mission, then this game is for you!
If you’re not looking for all that, you might still get your money’s worth out of the game. I’ve only completed a few of the scenarios and yet there is enough meat here that I’ve got over 20 hours in, and the rewards for each scenario are interesting enough that I want to see what the next batch will add to my arsenal.
– Real player with 52.6 hrs in game
Nice little game. Not very complicated as turn-based / strategy game, and it tends toward grinding, but it manages to keep me busy and interested. Also, the silly slapstick jokes make me smile. If you ever wanted to play as a gorilla bashing pirates with an anchor…
The game comes with a good number of “scenarios”. Start a scenario, you get a (very) small ship and 2000 gp, and a selection of 3 to 5 pirates to hire in the nearby tavern. First hire is free, and is usually the one you pick as the captain of your crew - at start, anyway, you can change your captain later.
– Real player with 39.0 hrs in game
Block Machine
Block Machine is a difficult yet poorly explained programming puzzle that combines the joy of doing homework for computer science class with the eerie satisfaction of toying around with Redstone in Minecraft.
In Block Machine, you build machines from blocks (who would have guessed!) to solve a variety of programming tasks. Block Machine’s programming model is unique: Blocks are both code and data, and all computation happens in parallel. Von Neumann would have loved this.
15+ Different Block Types to Explore
How many different ways can you find to use the basic arrow blocks? Or maybe you fancy the charged battery blocks? Wrap your head around the different capabilities and use them to build the smallest and fastest Block Machine.
25+ Challenging levels, ranging from HARD to REALLY HARD
Solve difficult programming puzzles in this Turing tarpit. Can you beat the global highscore in any of the three categories?
A Sandbox mode to mess around to your heart’s content
Build that 1000 block machine your dreamt about last night. Or don’t. It’s a sandbox!
DeadOS
DeadOS is less a game and more a really entertaining toy where you generate a city, populate it with people, and watch a zombie outbreak of your creation slowly take it over. There’s no win/loss state, and your only task is to keenly observe as zombies convert the living, civilians run in droves from the impending horde of undead, and cops create blockades around infection zones to slow the spread.
Though the graphics and presentation are simple, the scale of the simulation impressed me; up to ten thousand people can be simulated in the city. It’s oddly satisfying to watch a fleeing crowd of hundreds, abstracted as a bunch of scurrying yellow dots seen from a bird’s-eye view.
– Real player with 10.9 hrs in game
There’s no other game on PC like this. It’s already a pretty nice little sandbox game as it is now, can’t wait for all the features that come out for it over time. I completely recommend this game.
– Real player with 6.9 hrs in game
UnReal World
This may be the best game I’ve ever played.
You may be wondering why I’m about to give this game such a glowing review when I have under an hour of play time on Steam. That’s because it’s free. It’s been free on the internet for ages. Unreal World, developed by Sami Maaranen, and Erkka Lehmus, is a low fantasy roguelike set in Iron Age Finland. Of course, you know that from the description. To get to know this game, you need to immerse yourself in the world. And it’s a big, complex world. URW has been updated regularly since its release in 1992. That’s 25 years of frequent updates. The most recent version is 3.40, which just left alpha this year. I bought this game to support the devs, and it was worth every penny I paid for it. I’ll do a quick rundown of pros and cons.
– Real player with 776.4 hrs in game
I am absolutely ashamed of myself.
I’ve never considered graphics an issue. Many of my favorite games are pretty old, and I’ve never minded motionless sprites or minimal animation. I played Spiderweb Software’s Exile back in the 90s (and sank countless hours into both of its remakes), along with obscure RPGs like Realmz and TaskMaker, and I enjoyed some truly ancient roguelikes found on shareware CDs that came with magazines. I never had any problems with putting myself into my characters' shoes, graphics notwithstanding. I feel as if the minimal graphics give my imagination more freedom to roam and create on its own, much like reading a book.
– Real player with 588.4 hrs in game
Terra Randoma
I like Terra Randoma.
I have an In-Progress Let’s Play here if interested: https://youtu.be/0IkXQWdmTGs
And I will of course be updating this review as I progress further in the game.
That being said, let me say this: Terra Randoma is Fun.
At the start, the game Feels like Morrowind, with the 5 mains skills or your character, picking the Star sign, and starting on a ship. Terra Randoma does 1 better though, letting you make landfall where you want, not just directly to a sleepy swamp town.
– Real player with 93.7 hrs in game
not into rogue-like games at all but this is so easy 2 get into and fun. sum ruff edges albeit ea: map needs better zoom; should be able to plot route or prioritise objectives/quests sum how; should be able 2 designate sections of the backpack 4 categories of items e.g. top lh corner keep potions, bottom lh corner keep food otherwise i have to do regular house-keeping in the backpack; a way of keeping lists of priority items to buy, esp potions; have a variety of music when visiting tavern - that damn repeating fiddle is driving me crazy; needs clearer way of id ur location (yes, u can c it but it should b more obvious like a flashing light or something); differentiate between trading prices of shops in different villages and noting /tracking the differences (apart from better prices from sorcerer) so u can decide to go to village x instead of village y to get a better price 4 stuff as trading in food, potions, weapons/armour is critical to survival; combat needs 2 b more sophisticated otherwise it is just running away to build up stamina then turning to attack or just full-on attacking and take the damage if u have sufficient health/stamina. appreciate simplicity is key in rogue-like games but needs a bit more sophisitication otherwise it is repetitive, but looking fwd to improvements, already gr8 value. edit: deff need an arrow inventory so i know homw many arrows i have left - makes a diff to tactics, and, chests/barrels/weapons racks already opened need to be shown as plundered as there is a lot of going over old grnd to maake sure all the map is explored. the zoom needs to be able to ne zoomed out more.
– Real player with 66.6 hrs in game
Nomads of the Fallen Star
I stumbled upon this game and have been pleasantly surprised. This is a sci-fi tactical rpg. The mechanics are similar to Battle Brothers with more viability to trading. I’ve really been enjoying the game. The writing is not annoying and the art is original and compelling. The developer is very active with patches coming out every few days at this point. Several little quality of life things that were bothering me have already been patched away. I have only encountered one serious bug. If a dirty, hard scrabble sci-fi world and turn-based combat are things that you enjoy, you should give this a try.
– Real player with 41.6 hrs in game
I just had an epic fight in this game. It was me versus a group of enemy mercs. I started with 4 guys, they with 5. At the end we both had one guy left, each with shredded armor and 1 turn from death. I mean that literally, my character was on fire and was going to burn to death at the end of her turn. And I had 1 shot to take the guy out with 87% accuracy. And this whole time heavy metal was playing as the battle music.
I made the shot and won the fight. Then after some story text it was back to business. I placed the survelience probe and returned for my reward.
– Real player with 32.8 hrs in game
Wayward
TLDR: BUY THE GAME YOU WON’T REGRET IT!!
First, let me start by saying, My game play style is usually casual. I’m normally not a fan of rogue-like, perma-death games at all. Games that even have the words rogue-like or perma-death, I wouldn’t usually even give a chance…..BUT…..A friend that is, and always will be a rogue at heart in every game, that has played Wayward long before it even came to Steam, repeatedly tried to get me to play saying, “just try it, I think you will like this one” managed to get me hooked on this game.
– Real player with 1437.5 hrs in game
TL:DR -
This game is extremely good. The updates are pretty slow so that part sucks, but otherwise it’s pretty playable as is. There’s a decent exchange between the community and the developer, he’s super active on the game’s subreddit. In terms of community outreach I’d say the guy has been doing a phenomenonal job.
Having said that, some things can get a bit repetitive. One of my biggest gripes is how you can’t craft things in batches and instead have to do it one by one. This may not seem like a huge issue initially, but when you’re crafting 120 strings where each crafting action takes ~250-500ms then this adds up rather quickly (another good example is if you want to craft wooden arrows in bulk. You need a bunch of sticks first, and one of the best ways to get a bunch is to chop a few trees for logs and to dismantle them into bark and sticks, not mentioning gathering the feathers that are also required. Excluding the time required to gather the required feathers, it takes about 5 minutes to craft 120 arrows. 120 arrows may seem like a lot and it is if you’re fighting stuff on land, but if you’re fighting stuff that lives in the sea then each arrow is lost on a successful hit. It’s very easy to go through a lot of arrows in the process. I do like this mechanic of losing your arrows since it mostly makes sense, though I think you should be able to salvage a few if you carve up the monster’s carcass. It’s just a hassle to make more and more arrows, especially if you want the higher-tiered ones like iron/stone arrows). You need to use your mouse as well to craft stuff, so my mouse has taken a bit of a beating because of this.
– Real player with 284.1 hrs in game