Glittering skyscrapers, crowded streets, and complex infrastructure defined early city builders like SimCity and its descendants. If planning out municipal sewage systems is your thing, you still have plenty of hardcore construction sims to choose from, but the genre has grown to include more chill iterations of that formula since then, many of which reject cities altogether for a more rustic setting. That’s the tradition that brings us Outlanders, a friendlier type of city builder from Pomelo Games.

As its name suggests, Outlanders leaves its genre’s metropolitan roots behind in favor of a rugged wilderness its new inhabitants call the Outlands. Befitting its more bare bones setting, Outlanders is significantly more relaxed than some logistically minded city builders out there.

Rather than the open-ended land development of old-school sims, Outlanders is broken into around 30 levels, each with its own map and a unique victory condition. And instead of managing the infrastructure of a complex simulated city, you’ll usually only have a few distinct resources, a settlement of a dozen or so buildings, and a population that’s often in the low double digits. You’ll need to assign those workers to different jobs — and in later levels the micromanaging gets more intense — but they go about their jobs independently, so you won’t have to monitor each individual builder or woodcutting beyond that.

Those elements add up to something that often feels more like a puzzle game than a strategy sim. Outlanders is less about charting the long-term fate of a city and more about dealing with the here and now. Because you’re managing tiny populations and resource pools, a lot of the game is about prioritizing which jobs get done first and how to stretch your supplies to their absolute limits.

Your goals in Outlanders start out simple, with the first few levels challenging you to build a boat or stockpile food. Before long, things get much more interesting. One notable early level has you mass-producing bread, not to feed your hungry populace, but to build a giant human effigy for your somewhat deranged leader. Lots of the game’s stages share this bizarre sense of humor, and following the exploits of the various communities that populate the Outlands makes the campaign more engaging than you’d probably expect for a game that’s ultimately about resource management.

As stages progress, your goals get more elaborate and the needs of your citizens get more advanced. While your first few settlers will be content with the bare necessities, townsfolk in later levels will come to expect books, cozy accommodations, and gourmet food. These steps up in complexity come with a more sophisticated supply chain, slowly giving you more difficult tasks as you come to terms with the game’s systems.

Each level’s map is also designed to force you into tough decisions about where to direct your efforts. Some will keep you confined into a tiny plot of land, while others force you to clear massive forests before you can set down your own roots. After the first few stages, you’ll almost always be dealing with a deficit of some resource, so you can’t win just by stockpiling supplies and brute-forcing the goal.

Outlanders’ ever-changing objectives keep things fresh level after level, but they can also be extremely uneven in difficulty and fun. Like in many strategy games, running short on one resource can lead to a death spiral. Get low on food and your citizens will start starving, leaving fewer workers to gather food, and before you know it the entire town has gone belly up. The same can happen if villagers don’t get frisky enough to make children to replace elders who eventually die of old age.

You can manage some of those eventualities by issuing decrees — commands that can make your citizens hold a feast, speed up production, or have more kids. These let you exert huge influence on the flow of a stage, but it’s still incredibly easy to get overwhelmed if you fall behind on production. Frustratingly, these catastrophes can lead you to fail a stage you’ve invested hours in in the blink of an eye, leaving you to start all over.

More than once in Outlanders, I had to restart a stage multiple times over, then I steamrolled through the next stage without feeling even a hint of pressure. These stages are frustrating in their own right, as they can leave you with nothing to really do except watch your workers carry out their tasks and wait for the next one.

Despite these pacing issues, Outlanders is mostly a welcome, charming take on the city builder. Just as its level-based structure and relaxed simulation make it feel more inviting than other city builders, Outlanders’ music and art give it a lot more personality.

Outlanders’ graphics are simple, but there’s a ton of charm packed into its seemingly simplistic art. Buildings, people, and the landscape itself all have a bright, cartoony style to them, with surprisingly expressive animations. You’ll almost always want to play from a zoomed-out view, but you can also bring the camera in close to the ground and watch your villagers work the day away or chow down on pomelos and raw pumpkins.

The soundtrack is likewise sparse, often just an atmospheric tune played on piano, flute, or acoustic guitar, accompanied by the sounds of nature. It perfectly sells the spirit of the Outlands as a rustic environment for travelers to set down roots, and goes a long way toward making the whole affair more relaxing.

Outlanders occasionally breaks its own peaceful spell, making it a little too easy to kill off your entire village in the blink of an eye or drawing out its levels past the point of any challenge. But these are just minor bumps in the road along an otherwise pleasant journey. Outlanders blends satisfying strategy with an enticingly chill vibe, and packs a surprising amount of humor into its mostly wordless story. Don’t let its cute exterior fool you — Outlanders will test your strategic abilities even as it draws you in with its cozy charm.

Pros:

• Fun, relaxed take on the city builder genre

• Charming art and music

• Unique goals make each level feel different
  

Cons:

• Difficulty varies wildly from stage to stage

• Slow pacing makes some levels drag on

Score: 8/10