Aurora Dusk: Steam Age

This game is an absolute hidden gem. If you're looking for a long RPG with persistent characters and levels that stay with you, try this out. It's genuinely fantastic. It also has a civilization style 'age advancement' as the campaign or the missions progress.
The only downsides with it is there appears to be a memory leak after a few hours that causes maps to run sorta bluh but you can quit and finish easily. The game also seems weirdly choppy when characters move, and if a sequel is made it would be nice to be addressed.
Multiplayer also is iffy. While it works, it seems that whoever joins needs to manually reconnect occasionally, but all of your equipment and inventory is the same so it's not a big deal.

This is a hidden gem for Steam! Absolute must buy if you want a fresh take on a RPG/strategy/sim blend. It offers a unique experience with guiding a little town with its autonomous AI inhabitants all working to better themselves and protect their town. Imagine playing with Sims and they can build their own town from scratch, craft their own equipment but you also have to hold off waves of enemies or destroy their town, guiding everyone in yours and rallying them to raids as needed.
The freedom the AI townspeople have and the way they build, craft and level up is something I've seen very rarely in gaming. It's almost like they are little Sims with their own lives. You can help or sit back and watch as much as you like, but the player can really make a huge difference with the right involvement and choices. There's a fun campaign with a story to follow that introduces you slowly to all the features of the game and expands the scope of what you're fighting with some different styles of maps and enemy attacks. You also have sandbox modes you can set up a wide range of factors to make it easy or hard and change game types to give a lot of replayability.

Definitely one of a kind game. I might be bias o this because this is really close to a style game that I have wanted to make. I like it quite a bit and with a few easy tweaks this game could have massive replay ability.

If you are looking for a game that your year old can play without having to play but feel like they are doing something even though it's just AI working, and seemingly building things randomly in some kind of sequence.... it's like you can just watch... but they can feel like they are playing without it actually mattering what they do cause .... it's more like just watching a video than playing a game... I don't know what this is sort of reminds me of those "games" like adventure communist or whatever it's called. Is it worth the money.. yes, just for the experience alone... 58 minutes later.. I am still bewildered that this is being sold as a game.

Really nice little gem this. It deserves way more attention than it gets. It has a lot of depth and core elements that make it fun. Unfortunately the multiplayer was giving me and my brother trouble, it doesn't work like it used to. I would say try it and see if you can get multiplayer to work, if that's what you want and just refund it if you can't get it working. You should be able to test it after an hour. Shout out to the dev as well as i'm having multiplayer troubles(it crashes after it auto-saves i think).

Really interesting game with a lot of skills and progression.
It suffers a bit from not having a clear idea of what it wants to be. You build stuff, collect resources, progress your skills, that's the core gameplalay loop and it's very satisfying. But the campaign is more of a tutorial, and the survival and skirmish modes are very basic, fast-paced and ultimately feel like a placeholder. This game is great but would have been a masterpiece if it took the time to develop a game mode that better utilizes its excellent progression system.

The game is well designed. The 2D sprite graphics might detract a bit, but if you can deal with it, you'll have fun with this one.