Laysara: Summit Kingdom
A game by our friends!
the GameLaysara: Summit Kingdom is a challenging city builder which tasks you with creating a new home for your people forced out of the lowlands. During a campaign or sandbox playthrough, you will establish multiple towns, each on a unique mountain with its own traits. All your towns co-exist in symbiosis, creating a trading network, which you can then adjust to your needs by revisiting already developed settlements. The Kingdom of Laysara has to be rebuilt!
BUILD ON A MOUNTAIN
Each mountain comes with a new set of challenges. Mounts differ in shapes, vegetation zone layouts, resource availability and weather conditions. Sometimes you will have plenty of room for farming in green lowlands, sometimes you will need to rely on breeding and extracting valuable minerals from regions dangerously close to peak glaciers. If you find yourself in dire need of a certain resource, you can always try to establish a trading route with another town.
DEAL WITH AVALANCHES
One of the ever-present dangers you will have to deal with are mighty avalanches. You can’t stop them, but you can take precautions and be prepared. Afforest the key areas to create natural barriers, build artificial ones to redirect rushing masses of snow, or trigger the avalanche early, while it’s still manageable. Create a deliberate and reliable strategy and you might even be able to use the power of snow to your advantage; fail to do so and find your city buried and devastated!
CRAFT A TRANSPORT NETWORK
So, transporting goods is easy, right? Well, not if your destination lies on the other side of the mountain, a few hundred meters higher, behind cliffs, ridges, canyons and rivers. You will need to create a vast, complex transport network consisting of roads, bridges and shafts to ensure reliable delivery chains. As demand for resources will grow alongside the town’s population, always look for opportunities to optimise your transportation network, be it by building paved roads, using more advanced lifting constructions, or aiding your carriers with glamorous yaks.
RAISE A SUMMIT TEMPLE
If you manage to endure all mountain dangers, build a network of efficient production chains and satisfy all needs of your people, there is only one more thing to be done: conquering the mountain peak! To succeed in this great endeavour you’ll need to reach the summit and establish safe routes for your carriers to bring in enormous amounts of building resources, but beware! Weather at this height is as deadly as ever. The final effect is well worth the effort though, as raising the summit temple is an act of total triumph of human courage (and your logistics skills!) over the elements.
Final note: the game is a pure city building experience solely focused on the economy, resource management and surviving despite the inhospitable environment. Therefore, the game doesn’t feature combat or any other military aspect.
Game Discussion
Steam User 153
This game is super charming and really engaging, with a beautiful style and a surprisingly incredible soundtrack.
The gimmick of building on limited space is tempered by a very forgiving difficulty curve (at least on the default difficulty settings) and when things do start to spiral and the complexity of getting your yak milk cheese to the other side of the mountain turns into a beautiful tapestry of decisions. For example:
"I need yak carts to move the cheese" means "I need another university to research yak carts" means "I need more monks to populate my university" means "I need more food near my monks" means "I need to send fish to my monks by handcart" which means "I need more artisans for my handcarts" which means "I need more baths to make my artisans happy so they'll level up" which means "I've run out of space near my current baths so I'll build another artisan district on the other side of the river" which means "I need more food for this new district" which means "I need to up my Honey production in the nearby district" which means "I don't have enough peasant workers so let me expand that district".
So, you have a situation whereas to deliver cheese to the other side of the mountain leads to a complete revamp and expansion of pretty much every aspect of your mountain city, and then you get an extreme dopamine hit as each piece dominos into the next, leading to your eventual goal and an enormous amount of satisfaction from accomplishing so much to solve that problem.
It's not perfect, I feel like there's some small UX tweaks with navigation I'd like to see improved, but it'd be nit picking. This game is gorgeous, a vibe, and will satisfy players whether they play for aesthetics (the mountainside village looks so serene as you build it) or for the simulation aspects (see my example above). A steal at the price it's sold at, give it a whirl!
Steam User 36
What I love about this game is tibetan vibe with a pinch of humor, what I don't is a gameplay. In particular while you constantly have to adjust the puzzle, it'd be great to have a possibility to rotate buildings or to move a cluster at once. Besides I wish I had more info like transportation distance and similar building location as in big cities network becomes entangled.
Steam User 67
>want to buy Cities Skylines 2
>mixed rating, expensive ripoff, infinity DLCs, crashing
>meh
>look at Laysara
>it is cute
>cute makes me happy
Thank you Laysara, very cool.
EDIT: idk why this is 50% off on launch day, I actually would have paid full price for this, but I guess I'll just yoink this. Btw. the highest difficulty is really not easy and takes a lot of min-maxing. Space is tight on the mountain, you constantly need to rebuild older parts of the city, which become too inefficient lategame and wages are high too, so overproduction will wreck you economy.
EDIT 2: I am now on Mission 14 on the hardest difficulty. We returned to a map from a previous mission with my city exactly as I finished it, but the game now demands that I destroy parts of an older city where I already built a summit temple, in order to extract more resources and make things more efficient. It was really hard to get a gold balance of +500 there on an earlier mission, I spent a lot of time optimizing things already, and now I have to mess it all up because the game wouldn't give me the better tools for optimization earlier? Really unfun and rubs me the wrong way, because it feels like my earlier efforts were for nothing.
Steam User 9
It's less a city-building game than a puzzle game that happens to feature city-builder's elements.
Laysara is very far-fetched from Cities:Skylines or SimCity, or any other free-form city builder, It's more akin to an Anno-like, (Or, if you prefer, Caesar-like) type of game, with leveling up citizen-buildings and managing thier different climbing needs.
And while you can call most Anno games city-builders, Laysara leans even heavier into space-constrained management. So much so that down the line of campaign progresson, the space is so constrained that it becomes difficult for me to call it a true city-builder, rather than a straight-up puzzle, unless you're playing on an easy difficulty. (Mission 14, I'm looking at you)
Every building in Laysara feels like a puzzle piece that you have to get somewhat right (As it's not overtly punishing you for making unoptimal decisions) and when you get it right - it truly works. It feels like an organic way to make an Anno-style game less about fighting against opponents, (whether they are real players or, when it comes to campaign - AI) and more of a relaxed, puzzly type of city-builder, where you dont face outside threats other than your own shortcomings.
In the end, it's a very (with emphasis on VERY) beautiful game with enough content and meaningful differences between each city to warrant completing the campaign and a few other challenge missions that has a strong identity and knows what it is and what it isn't.
Steam User 10
Delightful.
TLDR: You run a Himalayan economy. Primarily, this involves you attempting to build an agricultural network powered by yaks and an increasingly complex network of relay posts to provide for your monks so they can do... something? Details are unclear. But the yaks demand your attention!
I was initially somewhat skeptical because it seemed fairly simple (boring), but the scaling of the economy forces you to switch from randomly placing buildings as needed to building complicated multi-step economic processes and then distributing them across several mountain faces. The increasing costs of transport add a nice touch, because you really need to think about how to distribute your resources. The characters are fun and lovable, the yaks plentiful, and it all takes place in the whimsical background of you attempting to supply an entire civilization of people with enough yak cheese to sate their endless hunger. Seriously, you will make so much cheese.
The one thing I wish I had understood before starting is that sometimes in the campaign you will go back to cities you previously built and expand upon them. This somewhat screwed me over because when approaching the finish of one level, I would sometimes try to do anything I could to hurl myself over the finish line (i.e., placing buildings randomly/wherever I could find room) only to find out later that I now needed to reckon with the consequences of my own actions, and that I would need to rearrange the whole city to provide my monks with enough butter tea for them to understand the secrets of the universe.
The game is easy to play, but hard to play *well*. You can often achieve your goals with enough brute force, scattering yak fields, beehives, and copper mines across every face of the mountain. BUT—completing levels efficiently and quickly, in an organized way, comes with a slight learning curve to work out the nuances of the relay system and the economics of yak distribution.
10/10 experience, won't lie. A whimsical take on a tried and true genre, set against a lovely backdrop.
Steam User 10
As you can tell, I played a little over 22 hours of this and I had to stop for my own wellbeing.
That is because, and I might be a bit off since it's been a while, but I'm pretty sure those 22 hours were divided up into no more than 4 sessions. This game scratches my brain so much, I could only bring myself to stop playing it because my body was screaming at me to please take care of myself.
So yeah, if you enjoy optimal planning and have a strategic, puzzle pattern-focused brain like me, you will absolutely love this. BUT BE CAREFUL AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF! Do as I say, not as I do lol.
I will probably open this game again one day and get lost in the sauce once more, as I have no self-control.
Godspeed.
Steam User 12
This is a really fun city building game.
The maps are really pretty and really well designed mechanically - the level designers have clearly put in a lot of effort. Different maps are quite different and lead to different challenges. I really like how much thought they seem to have put in to both the visuals (to make pretty mountains) and the mechanics - to lead different maps to play very differently.
City builders often suffer from the problem that once you work out how to build one city, all subsequent cities end up looking very similar. Laysara mitigates this in a couple of clever ways. Firstly, the requirements to evolve houses varies a lot between maps. City designs that work well for one set of requirements doesn't work on a different map. Also, maps are split over 3 biomes and are space constrained in different ways. Sometimes you have a lot of one biome but not so much of another. Sometimes rivers are plentiful, others not so much. It helps to keep things fresh.
I also enjoy that the game is quite difficult. I put it on the 3rd (out of 4) difficulty settings and had to think pretty hard to make a good city. Sometimes in these kinds of games everything is trivial once you get over the initial hump. A couple of things lead to the difficulty: firstly, because all the maps are space constrained, its not possible to plonk down a bunch of buildings inefficiently. Secondly, and more importantly, the game imposes significant transport costs between buildings, particularly for long distant transport. It's important to build the city keeping in mind what production chains need to send what to where.
I've been playing mostly on the 'Sandbox' mode. I usually avoid the Sandbox mode in these kinds of games, but I really enjoy it here. You're tasked with founding lots of separate mountain cities on one big shared world map. The different cities can trade with each other for resources not available on the local map. Some of the maps are full sized for building huge cities, but it also has tiny little maps intended for making little towns to supply resources to the big cities. I enjoyed making the little towns as its a change of pace.
I highly recommend this game if you enjoy city building games. I'm looking forward to the release of the campaign next month.