Lakeburg Legacies
Lakeburg Legacies is a social-based village management sim focused on pairing up your townsfolk to make the best, most effective families in order for your kingdom to grow and thrive. Make couples between your favourite villagers and create the best lineages generations after generations so the families can be as effective as possible in their jobs, which earns your village prestige!
Be careful though: each character has their preferences and their little flaws that you will need to discover, or else Lady Sophia the wealthy duchess will end up marrying the poor but handsome Alfred the farmer…
From small village to flourishing kingdom: manage your resources to thrive!
Make couples! Pair together the lovebirds of your town and find the perfect matches to create the strongest, happiest settlement around.
Write your legacy: happy couples will have children who will inherit their parents’ characteristics.
Drama! Navigate tricky, randomised events that will introduce chaos in the love life of your people. Try to keep them in check!
Everything procedural: every playthrough of Lakeburg Legacies is different – what kind of ruler will you be?
Steam User 132
As of writing this review, the game released two days ago and the devs have ALREADY given us a way to play endless and started addressing many of the early complaints. The game still has improvements to make, but a responsive dev team is a GREAT sign of things to come!
Steam User 131
I bought this game last night. I have played it for nine hours. There is a right sort of person out there for this game, and if you are also that person, you will probably end up doing a similar thing to what I did.
Importantly, if you're looking for a resource management game, you are not that person. I can heartily recommend the presets where you make the resource management aspects deliberately easy, because what that allows you to focus on is the PEOPLE MANAGEMENT. THE RELATIONSHIP DRAMA. THE BUILDUP OF A TWISTY, TURNY SOCIAL HISTORY FOR YOUR VILLAGE.
You can build such stupid, convoluted family trees in this game. And there is an interface provided specifically for clicking through and looking at all the intersections of grandparents, step-parents, ex-spouses, blended families, etc, etc. It's delightful. I'm really pleased that the full version of the game has the nobility aspect fleshed out, because I am a huge history nerd about the weird, intricate ways that nobles would build and change their families, make connections with each other, and such. And there is now a game which simulates this! (CK3 is all well and good, but it doesn't have that multi-family scope aspect).
I play these kinds of games for the stories that develop out of them along the way; the history that builds up over time, more than wanting to play towards a specific win condition or to manage my resources right. If that sounds like how you like to play your simulation games too, you will love this. My only complaint is that I really wish there was an endless mode - although I can appreciate how that might get a bit unworkable, with the way that the housing mechanic is currently structured. It doesn't exactly seem built for exponential growth.
I can see how this might be a bit of a niche game in terms of reaching the people to whom it REALLY appeals, but I promise you, we're out here.
Steam User 137
It seems I am only halve an hour in, but having played the demo for over 10 hours, I can tell you this game is very enjoyable. It scratches a certain itch I did not know I had, with the game combining a citybuilder with a dating simulator. I love watching my village grow over the generations, with some couples thriving and getting children (and grandchildren, etc.), while other couples suffer from early deaths or a nice looking neighbour who drives into divorce.
PROS:
- Genetics based family system with a decent range of different hairstyles, skincolors, eye colors and shapes, etc. (also: LGBTQI+ friendly relationship system which allows same sex couples to have children as well).
- Different ways to build up your village which allows for different strategies.
- Random events with a choice for you as the player spicing up the life of your villagers, ranging from deciding if a villager will stay with it's spouse or follow it's heart and marry the neighbour, to deciding whether or not your lumberjack will eat a strange mushroom in the forest.
- Very cute art style and user friendly interface.
- Medieval inspired soundtrack and cozy ambient sounds (including birds chirping and chickens cackling) for more immersion.
- Dev team which seems passionate and active with lots of ideas for implementing new features to the game.
CONS:
- At this point the game can only be played for a max of 100 in game 'years' per save, therefore it is only possible to see your village develop over a fixed amount of generations. I hope this will be changed to (many) more years in the future.
- Dating system can get a bit repetitive with the 'dates' being based on the same interactions which requires you to remember (or take a picture of) the traits of the person you are trying to date.
- Not really a con for me but might be for others: no real village customization. Buildings all have a fixed look and place on the map, so there is no diversity in different saves for the look of your village (e.g. sewing hut will always be in the same position on the map and houses are not shown on the larger map).
- Since the buildings have fixed places, there is no such thing as 'placing another farm'. Therefore, there might be a max amount of mouths you can feed, thus limiting the amount of villagers you could have in an indirect way. Does require some more hours of playing the complete version to truly confirm this.
Steam User 78
I don't think I'm playing this game the way that I'm supposed to.
As a romance-repulsed aro who studies domestication & domestic animals, I've been treating this game like a Husbandry Sim and by god it DELIVERS. I can't speak for it as a cute romancey dating game one way or the other, but if you're looking to line-breed humans in your own little colony that you help them manage like some kind of weird eldritch pet owner, this is the game for you.
I like management games where I have to take notes & this is one of those games. It's micro-managey but in the "direct with people" sense...if that makes any sense. It's not needless micromanagement for the sake of having things to do, but rather, everything feels very important. Maybe "micro"mangement isn't the right word; it's more constant management. This game keeps you on your toes keeping track of everyone, but doesn't mess around with too many pointless extra stats (though there are some...), and that's exactly what I want.
Humans are largely a self-sufficient species. As long as you have a big enough forest terrarium for them, with just a little guidance (and help from neighboring colonies for outcrosses, & our friendly neighborhood "matchmaker" who seems to know just about everyone, she's been in this business for years), you can have a successful little settlement too! Now if only I could take them to shows /j
Steam User 77
TLDR:
Overall Score: 3.5 out of 5, passes in pass/fail
There's not a lot of replay value, the game takes 10-20 hours depending on your play style.
The love aspect is strangely lacking for a game where that is the core theme.
There's no way to control building placement, it's all decided for you. You're just managing relationships and workplaces.
My full review is that I think it's a cute cozy game with a great premise, but the game has weird amounts of depth in some places, and is very shallow in others. I'm going to go into detail because the developer seems to be active in the community, so I'm just passing on my feedback in hopes they're watching and reading reviews.
Love matches are based almost entirely on a 6 card memorization game (3 likes, 3 dislikes) which you play once and then the couple marries. I wish there were more depth than that for a game with the core premise of matchmaking, but that's it. There's (seemingly) no impact these likes/dislikes have outside of relationships -- I had fishermen who hated fishing but loved their job, ballroom dancers who hated dancing but also loved their jobs, etc. Love grows or shrinks depending on random interactions the couple has after that, or you can pay hearts to give them gifts or uncontrolled dates (more on that below).
There are also other relationships: friends, enemies, minions, etc. These, for the most part, were entirely chance based. I couldn't force someone to talk to a coworker or a neighbor, the only guaranteed relationships were with immediate family. Everything else happened by chance. Once a character met someone, it was impossible to change their relationship type directly. You either grow the relationship, roll the dice and see what happens, or make them forget each other for 800 hearts. The success of all the chances is based on their trait compatibility, so if they have bad trait compatibility, you're SOL.
If they were enemies, I couldn't force them to resolve their issues, I just had to pay 125 hearts for a meeting and hope it went well. If someone fell in love, I can't make them ask to just be friends, I either needed to pay 800 hearts so they forgot each other forever or deal with them possibly breaking up their marriages I orchestrated. The fact that I'm paying hearts to make these meetings happened made me feel like I should have some control, or at least be brought on the meetup. Instead I just got a pop up that it went well and there's a positive effect or it went poorly and there's a negative effect. Additionally, the game seems to only punish you for having non-friendly relationships, which doesn't make sense. If this whole game is about the complexity of life, interactions, growing together, etc, I feel like enemy relationships shouldn't be such a negative. The only positive I saw to the relationships other than the workplace ambiance (explained below) is that they'd consume one extra or one less item, which just felt pointless.
All that being said, the worker placement in the game and the genetics were interesting. Planning to have kids fill certain jobs once they get older, putting together pairings that resulted in better kids, etc. was an enjoyable part of the game and had more depth than I was expecting. There's also "ambiance" to a work station, so if you have a worker with kind traits or have workers that are friends, they affect the ambiance of the workplace positively. Conversely, if you have someone who is mean or two coworkers that are enemies, they will affect the ambiance poorly. Positive ambiance increases production, while negative decreases it. Hopefully you can see why it's very frustrating that you can't make two farmers with compatible traits meet and be friends, but the game is happy to roll the dice and have two seamstresses with completely opposite traits meet and hate one another. Because I didn't have the hearts to make everyone forget each other, this usually resulted in a shuffling of workers between related workplaces to get the ambiance to neutral or positive.
The relationship building was what annoyed me the most in the game because that's *the point* of the game, that's the core mission and it was so strange that it seemed a little hollow. However, I also have other complaints about other aspects of the game:
- Building is literally just based on how many items you have. That's it. There's no minigame about placement, no synergy between workplaces, no visual customization, there's no research function, nothing. You just build your little tailor shop, the game removes the fog of war, and you have it now. It felt a little cookie-clicker if I'm honest.
- Why can family trees only show up to grandparents? I had great grandparents who didn't have any relationship with their great grand kids, and people descended from my first settler who I had to jump through multiple trees to find. If people are in the same family, they should all know each other, even if they're not immediate. People should be able to see their full trees. This is literally a game called Lakeburg Legacies!
- Gender doesn't matter at all with regards to children and anyone can marry anyone else (yay!), but there's still a gender binary indicator in the game (boo!). Just remove the gender indicator and let me change the hair and face to look like the gender I want. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it felt a little bit like we were happy to celebrate queerness as long as the T was silent.
Overall, again, I didn't dislike the game. It was just a strange mix of incredible depth and "did anyone think about this at all?" I've been watching this game for a long time, saw that the reviews were improving, and saw that it was on sale recently, which is why I bought it. I'm not unhappy I bought it!
As always, support small creators and studios, support queer-friendly games, support new and innovative ways to play games. I'll be watching the game as it develops and see where it goes.
Steam User 44
So, I've read all the negative comments and knew what I was getting into. With that in mind, I love this game.
I am the kind of person, that played Rimworld excusively with medieval and baby MoDs.
I am the kind of person, that builds family trees and *ahem* breeds humans in an endless grind (like in Sims). It's not a cute casual town-building game with romance choices, it's a grindy strategy-management game with a bit more life.
I Love how there are so many traits you have to be beware of. Like lifespans and love life of your people. Some families pop out babies like crazy and still continue after they're appearantly "too old" for babies. While others die single at the age of 19. Random divorces and quarrels keep the town dynamics and family lineage projects interesting.
You have to check up on them at work too, because they just might start a fight with they're colleagues and your work output will shrink and people will die of the consequences of lacking resources -NO STONKS- So you have to place them strategically with the other towns folk.
I think the problem for most reviewers is that there is no real goal or satisfying end to the game. Its an endless project of your own making.
Steam User 48
It's a game with the potential for something great, but it's still far from being so as it is.
For now I'd call Lakeburg a somewhat fun to play game with some confusing and/or badly implemented mechanics.
Some criticism:
1. Children and apprenticeship? Awful, sorry,
Children don't even start with a relationship with their parents, how does that work?
2. Talking about relationships... The system really needs some work, the only way you can shift a bad relationship is ending it, that's so costly I only did so when two villagers became sworn enemies.
3. While I could deal with the radomness in the matchmaking, as it's not that punitive, the careers of the invited neighboors should really be locked to the development of the village... There is no way in hell anyone would need a good "queen" at year 3 and that's money down the drain.