As with all terrible nostalgic posts on social media, this review opens with: do you ‘member The Settlers? Only ‘member, no play! The strategic series by Bluebyte was quite successful in the late 90s, but has since lost its popularity over time. What if you could play a modern strategic inspired by the Settlers’ mechanics, together with disquieting biblical disasters in the style of Cult of the Lamb? Get your old man ready for our dotAGE review.

Developed by Italian one-man studio Michele Pirovano over the course of eight years, dotAGE might easily fool people looking for a quick mobile-like strategy game to pass their time sitting on the loo. Place buildings here, make sure no one is starving, nothing so complicated, right? Well, wrong, dotAGE will reveal itself slowly over the course of several runs.

Yes, runs, this is not your average strategy where you learn to love and grow your village. Instead, dotAGE is a roguelite strategy, where you need to try and fail in order to learn its mechanics. Ending a run with enough of a high score grants memory points, which you can use to unlock more features. Story? Well, “I heard the old man tell his tale” of how he saved his village, by bringing his people to a new land. But, as luck would have it, they are not safe from curse, doom and gloom. There is an apocalyptic future event coming, thus the village has to be ready as much as possible to get through it unscathed.

First things first, you’ll have to get your villagers (or, well “pips”) to get food. This is easier said than done, as berries will soon run out, and by then, you’d better have several foragers ready to work. But you can’t stock enough berries, since there is a cap even if you haven’t built a storage unit. So, obviously the starting limit of four people is not enough, you’ll have to tell your people to make babies, so you can have a stronger workforce.

But naturally, more mouths equal more food, so you’d better be ready to have chickens ready to get those precious eggs. Alternatively, you can send out a hunter, if there are enough critters around. But you’ll need a thinker, since those buildings and roles will have to be researched, perhaps even one specialized in that role since there are not enough poi- phew, I’m already overwhelmed.

That’s most runs in dotAGE honestly, it is very easy to get overwhelmed, unless you first get all the mechanics down to a swift process. Even on the easiest level, “relax” which makes negative events unnoticeable, you’ll still have to deal with everything I just described. Each turn will have to be carefully planned, or pretty soon you’ll find yourself running out of food or people to assign jobs to. And starving people don’t make for happy people, so they might get sick or even just become criminals if the overall mood of the village is that of fear, rather than hope.

How to restore hope? Well, of course, we need buildings that bring positive vibes, along with the right events. But in each run, many things are randomized, so it might easily happen to just get unlucky and have our entire village wiped out, despite our careful planning. Do not be fooled by its cute pixel art appearances, dotAGE is indeed quite ruthless. In its ruthless design, I feel that it needed a much stronger and clearer tutorial, which instead seems to miss out on a few key points. Perhaps, dotAGE would benefit from a full-on tutorial mode, where you can practice all of its mechanics without feeling pressured.

Instead, dotAGE seems to rely on the player to just go ahead and read all up in the encyclopedia in order to remember all connections between the various buildings, roles, pips, etc. Also, there are no “save slots”, you just have one single village and no manual saves. If you make a wrong choice, too bad, you’ll have to restart, as there is no present way to grow more than one village at a time.

As it is, you’ll need to practice and be patient with dotAGE. Naturally, that patience may be rewarded with neat mechanics that you won’t find in a lot of strategy games (at least, not altogether). But that also means that, overall, I feel dotAGE seems to be aimed at real fans of the genre, rather than random nostalgics of the Settlers. Or perhaps it’s just a bit of feature creep that ended up overstuffing dotAGE with too many things going on at once. Either way, you’ve been forewarned, that an apocalyptic event is coming, so you better be ready for it.

Our dotAGE review was made possible with a key provided by the developer. dotAGE is available on Steam.