Games like Manor Lords and Dwarf Fortress are painstakingly crafted, deeply nerdy conversations about someone’s pet interest. And that’s what makes them great.
I should have been enjoying the beach. I was on vacation, far from my gaming PC, and close to soothing, rolling waves. But instead, my mind kept drifting to a landlocked chunk of 14th century Germany. Few games have wormed their way into my brain like Manor Lords.
The medieval “city builder with battles,” as the developer Slavic Magic describes it, is intricate and challenging, with lots of moving pieces and interdependencies. It’s also, at times, immensely frustrating. There’s a satisfaction to that, like a multi-step puzzle box — you suss out countless tiny solutions until they all build up to the satisfying click that finally opens the lid.
But I think what’s gotten to me most about Manor Lords is not the complexity, the attention to detail, or even that satisfaction you get from planning out a city and watching it thrive. I think it’s Greg.A guy named Greg
Manor Lords is a passion project. Greg Styczeń, who goes by Slavic Magic, has been working on its design for seven years. And there’s something funny about the entire dev team behind a successful game consisting of just this one dude named Greg.
But it’s not that you see Greg’s hand in every pixel — there are no in-jokes or easter eggs, and even the graphics are based on historically accurate scans rather than showing some individual style. Instead, the passion part of the project can be found in how the game works.
Manor Lords’ villages and towns bustle. There’s always activity. People and livestock cart goods between buildings, structures get built from the ground up while you watch the progress, vendors call from the marketplace, and farmland gets plowed, sowed, and reaped depending on the season. And you can just watch it all happen, either zoomed out and watching from above like some, well, lord, or zoomed way down to ground level, following the folks (or sheep) around on their daily tasks.
And Greg did all that.Two brothers and some hapless dwarves
Stardew Valley has a similar story — developed by a single person over four years, it has gone on to sell more than 30 million copies. So does Undertale. And even Minecraft. And a game called Dwarf Fortress.
I’d been aware of Dwarf Fortress for a while and even tried (and failed) to play it a couple of times over the years. Then, in 2022, I caught COVID-19 and it knocked me on my ass. With a couple months of downtime, I finally decided I was going to figure it out.
And I fell in love with that ridiculous, ASCII-graphicked, supercharged spreadsheet of a game. It was still baffling and user-unfriendly, but it slowly started to make sense. Well, most of it did — I still don’t really understand armies (and I even wrote a whole guide about them).
