(Written November 9th 2023)

One of the newest games as of writing that I've played from this list, as well as one of the only mobile games so far! (Though it's also available on Steam and other platforms from what I remember)

I'd recently gotten an itch to look for a new game to have on my phone in general. I'm drawn usually toward simple puzzle games or light strategy games, but in trying to find something new- it took little to no time to run into the typical worst tropes of ““free““ mobile games. Wait timers you can pay to speed up, gacha pulls, adverts every other minute, if I'm just wanting to grab a game for a few minutes to play- having to sit through ads or putting the funny digits of my credit card in to get past a pay wall, that's garbage!

So I had the dumb realization of like, I could look at actually paid titles in the shop instead?? Y'know where the likes of Terraria mobile, Monument Valley, and other games with a lot of the mobile bs cut out- would be??

So after browsing for a little bit I came across the title here, Dungeon Village 2, along with the studio itself and the fucking MASSIVE library of management sim games they had. All with equally high marks for the ratings! I don't doubt they were able to produce such a large variety of titles by reusing assets between games, as the visual style is all very similar (highly simplistic pixel art, but very charming for my own standards). In any case, this company absolutely found their niche and rolled with it, and successfully so- as after the amount of times I've picked up the game to play while waiting for videos to render during work, or on airplane rides from my recent trip back home from visiting my partner, I have a growing itch to pick up more titles from this studio.

This one was $5.99 usd, which is as expensive as their titles seem to get- with several others being on sale for as little as $2. It brought me right back to my times in computer lab at highschool, or downtime at home as a kid browsing random game collection websites, with town management games or tower defense games being my favorite go-to's.

This title has a heavy RPG themed focus, with building out your town to draw in new little adventurers that can go fight (or befriend!) monsters, explore dungeons, and help out with your town. You can kit them out with equipment and gifts collected from the game, hold little events to bolster your town's popularity, and work towards making an overall 5-Star town- after which its implied you can take your favorite adventurers out to a new land and start the gameplay loop of building your city out all over again. Every new star you earn as well, layers more and more mechanics to poke around at for helping improve your town or provide new ways to interact with your adventurers and villagers alike- and I think the pace that these are added is perfect to ease into without growing too overwhelming.

This game is a constant serotonin feedback loop, for better and for worse. Other than smaller menu items being slightly finnicky to tap, it's absolutely perfect I think in the mobile setting. Where you poke in for a couple minutes (or in my case over an hour at a time), get some new upgrades or villagers, and put back down. The game can inundate you at times with pop up after pop up of new events being unlocked or quests discovered, and I wish that it went to a notification window I could check when I'm ready, rather than filling the screen and interrupting gameplay. The features to remove and rearrange objects in your town can also be a little bit clunky once unlocked, though I think the quirk of it has a bit of a weird charm all its own, especially seeing the buildings have their own quick reconstruction animation for whenever they're relocated lol.

Overall, if you're looking for a title that is very pick up and play, but has a little more to sink your teeth into than an unending puzzle game, this was the perfect fit for my own needs. And I'm probably going to be slowly collecting the other simulators they have available hahA