Mandrake – the rural life sim that lets you befriend a river and eavesdrop on the dead | Games

WIth Dulcet Walsische Tones, an actor with an uncanny resemblance to Michael Sheen introduces the players into the world of Mandrake. The village of Chandley is “small” and “complicated”, he says warmly. “Everyone has their own story.” The campaign cuts between cozy, wooden cottages and a forest covered with mosses -covered forest. We see the protagonist, a magician of the gardener who “is aligned in the green and growing arts”, returns home and takes care of a wealth of vegetables. You can find some in your local supermarket; Others have a more magical diversity.

As a rural life simulation, Mandrake is tedious and more beguiled than most others. It has the same undeniable stimulus as classics like Harvest Moon and Stredew Valley and invites the players, to the seasonal flow of harvest cultivation, to explore the land and to hatch with suspicious happy cities. But there is more going on here: lavish, picturesque graphics to start. And if you tire of ordering the ground, you can deviate the leaked path of this mythical, Brythonically inspired country, maybe listen to the dead or even make friends with a river.

Strangeness can be expected in a new publication by Failbetter, the Boutique UK studio behind recognized titles, London and Sunless Sea. In a common fictitious universe played that narrative RPG and moody survival experience were master crops in evocative prose and fascinating world buildings. London was “fallen” and in a darkened underworld named Neath, newly located on the coast of a huge black oceans-of the so-called session.

These games, terrible and in almost equally funny, were rooted in a clever place in the village. Mandrake foreground in a friendly, more accessible way. The beauty of rural life Sim, as Game Director Adam Myers sees it, is that “they are able to enlarge a community over time”. In days, nights and seasons, the player testifies to a changing place and its people. They go from a feeling of total unknown, says Myers, to have developed deep knowledge of the environment.

But Mandrake aims to avoid the more marked tendencies of the genre – to cultivate hectares wheat and prepare several daily meals. “It is not optimal to grow their harvests in large rectangular monocultures,” says Myers. “And they don't do the thing on which they click 30 times and lead the ratatouille worth a banquet in their inventory at any time.”

The gift gipper, the typical way, how the players insert themselves with their NPC neighbors in this genre, arrives with a wrinkle. Players can't just spend gifts by chance (“This is a bit uncomfortable,” laughs Myers). Instead, you have to explain why you distribute your offer. This forms the beginning of a relationship based on obligation.

The aim is not only to replicate the pattern that can be seen in other rural lifestyle, but also “complicate” both through thoughtful mechanics and by an unusual series of influences. Myers enthusiastically speaks of anthropology, British folklore and esoteric traditions such as the Renaissance alchemy. The world is full of quirky and mysterious traditions: it is inhabited by “quasi-monastic organizations”, and despite the Welsh influences in the landscape, there is an uncanny absence of sheep.

The calming rituals of rural life Sim seem to act special and unusual tendencies as a trojan horse for failbetters. “One of the error patterns we have fallen into in the past is too strange, too fast, too early,” admits Myers. “We have to give the players more stable to stand on it so that they can understand everything.

Unholy creatures undoubtedly lurk in these old forests; Village dwellers are likely to hide many important secrets. It is reasonable to assume that Myers and his colleagues taste like the macabreen surfaces in any way. But there is a decisive difference to be a concession, which he hopes is an inviting and “emotionally gentle” tone: In contrast to some other games by Failbetter, death does not lurks so close to her shoulder. Or as Myers puts it: “You will probably not be able to eat in it.”