Build a mobile village and travel with your tribe toward the center of the world, called The Eye. This roguelike turn-based resource-management game is made of procedural situations, natural events, skill-trees and hard choices. Ready to move?
You play as the wind guiding the Pupils, a tribe that must reach the center of the world. You’ll have to manage their resources, their buildings, and their lives. Help them grow wiser through agriculture, crafting, scientific and mystical research before the world is submerged. Be careful though, you have to manage your tribe perfectly and make sure they’re not starving or taken by surprise by the waters.
The game is a nomadic turn-based city builder. Begin a procedurally generated journey and survive halt after halt, as far as the Eye.
Steam User 186
This game was incredibly brutal until I discovered the Council building and the Knowledge resource, and then it became an incredibly fair and deep city-building/roguelike/4x game.
The biggest problem with the game is there isn't a good reference for how all the mechanics work. I think it will be better once an online wiki is available.
My tips for a winning initial game:
Opening:
1. Get 40 wood and build a sawmill. Assign one of your workers to be a gatherer and gather wood. Later, when you don't need wood, switch this worker to be a food gatherer and build a fruit hut for 80 (you can do this earlier if you get a 4th worker). You should have enough rations for this, and the carpenter/fruit gatherer jobs share the first 3 levels.
2. Get 120 wood and build a dispensary. Assign one of your workers to be a druid and harvest herbs. IMPORTANT: Druids generate a ton of Knowledge after they hit level 2, so just keep leveling the druid
3. Have your third worker be a dedicated builder/explorer. Explore the map and do all of the following:
* Find a source of stone, build a quarry for 100 wood, and gather stone until you have 120 stone
* Find a source of ore, build a minefor 100 wood, and gather ore until you have 120 ore
* Find one packbeast and recruit him
5. Now, you can build the Council auxiliary building. It has to be built on a plain next to your starting location, so make sure you leave some space! Build it and click on it and open the tech tree that you never knew existed.
6. Look at the bottom left. See that technology? It saves 6 rations/turn for your WHOLE TRIBE. You want to beeline to this thing as soon as you can. You need to upgrade your Coucil twice, and it requires some combination of Wool/Wood/Stone/Ore (I don't remember exactly). Then, this perk costs 900 Knowledge. Rush this ASAP.
7. The tree on the right hand side is key to managing Vagaries. You can skip ANY vagary by paying 350/400/500 knowledge (increases as the game goes on). You can also get earlier and earlier warnings by upgrading this tree, so you can be selective (e.g., you are on a map with no jungles, and the next vagary places disease in jungles)
8. Also prioritize a market and upgrade it to Tier 3. You need 5 different resources to do this (Knowledge/wood/ore/stone/wool). Don't be afraid to rotate workers around. The market is pretty much useless if you don't upgrade it, but it can really save your bacon if you specialize in one/two resources.
9. Mobile buildings are overrated early-on. You will have plenty of wood; have your woodcutter keep leveling up and SPEND your resources
10. This leads me to...DONT STOCKPILE early on. If you have harvested enough ore/stone for a tech upgrade, get it and move on.
11. Always get the first upgrade on the fruit hut (-1 harvest time), even on permanent buildings. Trust me, it's amazing, and will level up your gatherer even faster (gatherers can cost no food per turn when fully upgraded, depending on your build).
12. Select skills that increase knowledge-per-harvest whenever you can (e.g., if you aren't having food problems, have your fruit gatherer take the +Knowledge per turn instead of fruit per turn)
13. In the council building, there are relatively cheap tiers of knowledge that reveal the path costs for both one- and two- paths later. Use these to plan your routes! Not all resources are available on every map!
Anyhow, all the people who are upset about the randomness of Vagaries and needing too little food probably didn't rush Tier 3 Council. And yes, the devs should have made it more obvious how critical this building is for early success. But don't let that turn you off from this game; it's an incredible resource management game, with a relaxing atmosphere and beautiful art. It is challenging without being crazy 4X (think Stellaris) level deep. If you think you'd like it, ignore the negative reviews here, give my advice a shot, and enjoy
Steam User 101
I was a few turns away to win the game, then a rodent event happened and lost a huge amount of resources to it. The result? The wave catched me and my tribe was flooded. The fail was expected. The fun brought by this game was unexpected.
As Far As the Eye is a very challenging resource management 4X strategy game and the developers spiced it up. They moved the whole game into the field of roguelike games. Not a common combination for turn based strategy games.
If you curious what contents the game offers and how it is look then check out my short video about this game:
You will always be short on resources, you will feel that your workers eat too much food while they produce too few resources. In the meantime the wave is coming… It is hard to master the game and easy to fail in it. Understanding the mechanics, react to the deadly events all required if you want to finish a run at least once.
Don’t be mad if you can’t do it tho. Custom Game is available so you can adjust the game to the way you want to play it.
Conclusion
I enjoyed my time with this game.
Story: 7/10 Water is coming, it could be the story of our world while the ice caps are melting. Kevin Costner would disagree.
Replay value: 8/10 Roguelike game so replay value is huge, but the game could be uninteresting after you win it a few times.
Atmosphere: 8/10
Visuals: 9/10 I believe the visual of the game is very good. Very artistic.
Music/Sound effects: 9/10. Relaxing and charming soundtracks offered by this game.
Game difficulty: 8/10 While there are custom game achievements not available on that mode and the regular gameplay is very challenging. Finishing a run is far from easy.
Hey, I am an achievement hunter!
Perfection time: Now this part will be updated at a later point when the game will be listed on my curator. Achievements awarded for unlocking new traits, what then could be on your worker. How to unlock those? Probably awarded for your actions you done during your gameplay and unlocks ONLY once the game was won. Because of this, it will be always hard to predict what unlocked a new trait, therefore 100% achievement will be quite hard and time consuming.
If you liked the review or you like to earn achievements, but in enjoyable, fun and entertaining games, then please follow my Average Achievement Hunter curator or just check out our curated games. Thanks
Steam User 32
I don't review often, but I've been really enjoying this game, and it seems like it's getting quite a few negative reviews with impressions that don't match what I've been experiencing, so I wanted to offer a different perspective.
At its core, this game strongly rewards careful planning and familiarity with its systems. The tutorial Campaign doesn't cover everything it should - of the criticisms I've seen, this one is valid. You should probably expect to lose your first game, or at least have a rough time, because you're figuring out the stuff it didn't tell you.
However, the other criticisms I've seen a lot of, especially about how easily you can lose to RNG, are a lot less valid, at least once you know what you're doing. I can imagine getting a start with particularly debilitating traits on multiple starting colonists and being unlikely to succeed, but I haven't gotten that bad of a roll there yet, and even if it happens sometimes, it'll probably be obvious immediately and you can restart the run if you want.
As for event RNG, it's pretty easy to deal with - you'll always see minor problems coming at least 6 turns in advance, sooner with research, and most of them can be mitigated by making choices: don't have people working the turn an Overwork event pops, or make sure everyone's working though Boredom, and they won't get sick; if important buildings get damaged, either repair them early enough that the next event won't destroy them or make a plan to move on from the loss if it does. In the mid-to-late game, you can use Knowledge Points at the Council building to negate upcoming events - if you don't do it too often, this will let you keep from folding to the particularly bad ones. This doesn't work on the Major event at the end of each level, but you can usually be gone before then if you want to be.
Finally, there are complaints about not having enough resources on the map to pay the cost to the next stage - yeah, it happens, but again there's counterplay. You can always see the costs for the next 2 legs, so if you see a good stage ahead, but after it there's only 1 path and it's expensive, consider going somewhere else. It's risk vs reward. If a map is low on a needed resource, the Market can let you trade for it (though the rates are horrid, especially when not upgraded).
In my opinion, this game is difficult but ultimately gives the player the tools to deal with the difficulty. If you like building/resource management games where planning well is important, I'd recommend.
Steam User 32
Hard as nails, brutal, unforgiving, oppressive even at times, but also cute, fun and deep.
As it is a turn based recource management game, it requires you to keep a very close eye on your recources at all times and gives you a lot of other things to watch too. Actually requires more attention than most games on the market which is also the source of most of the negative reviews so don't pay too much attention to reviews which complain about difficulty.
The game is just not for them.
If you want a game that plays itself and holds your hand all the way to the bitter end:
better move on because this isn't that game.
If you don't back away from a challenge on the other hand:
go right ahead.
Easy to learn, hard to master.
8/10
(minor glitches)
recommended for fans of the genre
Steam User 31
It's an okay little strategy game; manage a small tribe of people as they make their way across the lands, assign them gathering and production tasks and build buildings to get them through the hardships and costs of traveling.
My recommendation is half-hearted because it's a bit of a mess. It wants to be zen, but it also wants you to struggle. It wants to be stylish, and prefers stylish over clarity. The tutorial tells you things that are thematic, and which contradict the actual game play. There's a decent strategy game in there if you want to search for it, but you're going to wrestle with the visuals and the UI to get the information you need to make it through.
Steam User 14
As Far As The Eye is a beautiful turn-based strategy game. You have to build up a village. Each resident has his own personality. You can level each one up individually and let them learn different skills on a skill tree. The goal is to survive to get into the centre of the world - The Eye. On your way, you have to get different resources to get to the next map. You can't take everything with you to the next one, since there is an inventory and you have to manually stack resources or buildings in it. The counter tells you when the wave arrives. Each turn lets the timer count down. If you don't have the resources to travel 'til it reaches zero, the game is over.
The campaign works as a tutorial. There are 5 missions which will teach you how the game works. Aside from that you can set up your own session with your own rules OR just play in sandbox mode where you have to unlock each tribe.
A session is different thanks to procedural events, skill trees and negative or positive traits for each resident.
It is somewhat comparable to games like civ even through there are no battles in it. Tbh, civ and the likes are to complicated for me. There is so much detail, you have the feeling you need to study before you can enjoy it. With As Far As The Eye it's not like that. The game starts out pretty simple which is a good thing since you have fun from the start. The longer the game goes, the more complicated it gets. You're learning while playing. There are many little details in the game. It's not like its to easy. It's more accessible.
The game just looks so beautiful. The music is atmospheric. It's easy to learn and hard to master. I didn't thought i'll have that much fun while playing a tutorial. It's much more accessible than civ or other games in the genre.
I would have liked more missions in the campaign. Aside from that even sandbox sessions are fun since there comes always a story with it (somewhat like in frostpunk).
It's different than other games in the genre. Everyone who is into city building sims should get this game. It's definitely worth it!
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Steam User 12
The game is nice and challenging. Haven't yet finished any expert scenarios yet, only all of the basic ones with all the tribes and of course the "campaign" (actually, it is just a tutorial).
The tutorial does not explain all of the mechanics, but you will learn most of them. The rest have to be explored by paying attention to the interface (click on all buttons and read all tooltips on them, buildings especially), the council stuff and caravan upgrades especially, which is fine, and reading random tips on the global map, which is a weird place to learn things that can be important, but whatever.
Despite what some of the reviews say, in my opinion, the GUI is good and easy to use. There are enough tooltips that explain what everything does, selecting what you want is most of the time easy and to highlight resources you can leftclick on them in your storage (top left). But there doesn't seem to be a way to highlight all of them and quickly finding sacred sights and remains is hard since those can not be highlighted. But these are mostly minor problems.
Again, despite what many reviews say, the council building (and its upgrades) have not been necessary for me to finish most of the basic scenarios. Many vagaries (random bad events) can be safely ignored or their effects circumvented. There is a way to play by highly relying on the council building, but it is not the only one.
The harmony score that can be seen at the end of a scenario seems to reflect how much resources you have gathered and wasted (symbolizing taking what is not necessary for survival and completion of the journey) and probably increases the frequency of vagaries. So if you are mostly working directly for the objective (which you should anyway, since the game is about optimization) you will not have to worry much about the harmony score and face less bad random stuff. Probably.
Random generation could be improved, since some things just don't make sense (auras that protect ore in an area when there is none or vagaries that affect jungles that may not be on the map at all).
All in all, game is nice, clean, cozy (despite the challenging nature), allows for multiple strategies to achieve objectives, presents challenges that require adaptation (depending on the difficulty of the scenario) to win and has random generation for maps, scenarios and other things which provide replayability. A fresh idea and good execution.