About Northwind:
Northwind is a strategy game where in you need to expand your clan as quickly as possible, amassing the supplies you need to survive and grow. It took me a hot minute to realize but it seems the goal is not to conquer other areas and other clans so much as to gain more fame. I may be wrong in this regard though as in my 4 hours of game play I have not reached the end game. I’ve gotten close once. The art style is lovely and so is the music. The difficulty in gaining resources isn’t too bad. Some resources SEEM scarce at first but you quickly realize there are a couple ways to gain things. Such as for food you have a few options. You can find an area with fertile land and build a farm, find an area with animals and make a hunting lodge, find a pond with fish and make a fishing hut, and you can even go a little bit without any of that as long as you keep a few of your people as villagers because they will auto gather food. You can gather wood from building a woodcutter in any area with trees, you don’t HAVE to have a forest. It’s just that the forests provide MORE wood. The true pressure in the game though is food, as food is how you colonize another area and you need to expand your area and how you feed your people. You need to expand your area rather quickly because once another clans boarders touch yours…. it becomes much more difficult to expand. Also ♥♥♥♥ kobolds. Overall it’s a great game…. but it’s held back by two things for me.There is no proper tutorial that I can find. If you start in single player there are “hints” that tell you what you should do next, but it doesn’t explain much of anything to you. I played through like 3 times before I finally figured out how the forge worked, that I could pick stats that made my clan more defensive or offensive, and that the markplace didn’t just passively make money I had to set up trade routes. I still don’t understand how rivalry’s work and I haven’t looked up a tutorial yet because I wanted to see if I could understand the game without one. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind when a game doesn’t really hold your hand however… the lack of a tutorial is amplified by my second complaint.
