Adorable strategy games where you herd a bunch of tiny idiots are in short supply these days, so let me tell you how exciting the trailer for Craftlings, debuted today at the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, has made me: Very excited. As a child of the Lemmings generation still very much in love with modern pixel art, this one’s just for me, specifically, but it can also be for you.
The trailer shows off the eponymous little big-nosed dorks as they cut down trees, build stuff, climb ladders, and just generally swarm all over the place making a tiny civilization across distinct biomes—one a bit alpine, the other a dry desert, and one quite snowy. They build bridges, float resources in balloons, and ride lifts between separate levels of their odd little ant-farm-like world. It’s a jolly hive of productivity.
In Craftlings you can expect to deploy little guys, first equipping them with tools to mine resources, then constructing new buildings with their own jobs. Building up the settlement and expanding lets you get a more complex, robust economy of merchants and chicken coops and alchemists—one capable of supporting warriors to defend your craftlings from monsters like skeletons, dragons, and perhaps even skeletal dragons. The trailer even shows a ballista being fired at some manner of giant octopus, or perhaps a kraken.
Craftlings is a “resource-management puzzle game,” publisher Raw Fury describes, where you’ll “build settlements across several diverse biomes. To do this you’ll assign tasks, gather resources, set up automated production lines, and upgrade your Town Hall to unlock new building types.”
There’s an undeniable appeal here if you loved Lemmings games, but also if you’ve previously enjoyed the kind of side-on strategy from publisher Raw Fury, such as Kingdoms.
You can find Craftlings on Steam, where it has a demo—if it seems familiar, it was previously listed as The Settlings. It’s made by a solo developer, Ariano Games, and published by Raw Fury.
