This survival/building game puts you in charge of a village in a fantasy version of the dark and dangerous Black Forest in medieval Germany. Hungry wolves have been plaguing the peasants, stealing their chickens at night, and things are about to get worse. Much worse.

Assign peasants to tasks and balance gathering and building defenses with harvesting food and maintaining the village. Every decision is final, every loss is permanent. Every mistake brings you closer to be swallowed by the forest, your people's story forgotten and lost in the sands of time.

This demo contains the tutorial and one level on two different difficulty settings.

Gameplay

Similar to a real-time-strategy (RTS) or city-building game, you build and repair houses, fences, walls, watchtowers and others in your village, using resources and labour. The peasants of the village are your pool of labour, you can send them to gather resources, plant and harvest fields, construct buildings and so on.

Once the monsters arrive, things change. Losing a peasant also means losing someone from your workforce. As the monsters take their toll, your options shrink. Mistakes snowball into shortages. Decisions that seemed so easy and unimportant early on now turn out to be vital - or deadly.

You never have enough actions or resources to do everything you want to do, get used to it. It's essentially a resource-shortage management game.

Unique Factors

While Black Forest has city-building aspects, the gameplay is not about expansion and growth, but about defending what you have. This keeps the play small and manageable and makes decisions more meaningful.

While there are strategy aspects, the game is about survival, not conquest. You cannot effectively fight back against the monsters. Hanging on, even by the skin of your teeth, can be a victory. It is a game about standing against impossible odds, and with clever planning and timely execution making it through hell.
This also keeps individual games to a manageable length. You can complete a whole game in one session, no problem, it will take around one hour, depending on how much you slow down or speed up time.

And while it has management aspects, you will find only the slighest hint of supply chains and "need to build this before I can build that" logic. You need to manage your resources and your workforce. You do not need to explore a tech tree or dependencies. The game does not artificially limit what you can do.

Early Access

The game is not yet fully playable. The current versions have only some levels and many buildings and other features are not yet available. However, updates are coming constantly. Follow the community channels to stay up to date on the development progress.