Nested lands takes place in a medieval world riddled with plague, and yet you task yourself with rebuilding a village in these lands. It will be a tough task, but if you keep your head about you, you can make it happen.
Your adventure starts with a bit of misfortune as you crash land your ship on the island you plan to make the village. As you wake from the crash, you meet your first friend and ally in this world, Balder. Balder is your main guide and quest giver, making him an integral part of the game. And after the small tutorial area, he will lead you to where you will set up your village. This is where the real fun and challenge begin to appear.
You start with a few basic buildings, but as you progress, you can gain more with different abilities. These range from a crematorium for burning bodies, an apothecary's hut to make medicine, and a blacksmith shop to craft metal armor and tools. However, the most important building you can make is the carpenter's workshop, as it is the only way to make the needed items to deal with plague sites.
Now, you can use this building yourself, but this is meant to be a village, so why not find some help to lessen the load on yourself? To do this, you first need to make sure you have a house for them to sleep in; no one likes to be rained on in their sleep after all. Next, you need to make sure there are enough wells and wash huts so your people can stay hydrated and clean.
You will also need to tend to their food needs as well. This can be done by grow beds and traps that you can place outside your town. And when you start getting more people in, you can assign them to tend to these tasks as well. You also get a proper cookhouse later to make better meals than what you can make on a campfire.
Once you have all that in place, you then need to find someone to recruit to your village. You can find people via event sites marked by your map, so check it often, as you never know when one will pop up. These can be in a camp by themselves or in a cage captured by bandits. That's right, as well as the plague, you also have bandits to worry about. Not just as you wander around, they can also raid your village and steal you hard earned resources.
As mentioned before, you also have to deal with the death plague, which is found in sites all around your island. The only way to clean them is to make a bow and fire arrows in the carpenter's workshop and burn them from long range. As if you get too close, the plague will take hold of you, and that’s a bad thing.
Now, like your villagers, you have needs to take care of as well. You have to manage your sleep, hunger, thirst, cleanliness, and warmth. Hunger, thirst, and warmth, if not taken care of, can start to drain your health, so keep a close eye on them. If your sleep falls too low, you will be unable to run, and if you don't keep yourself clean, your smell can alert enemies to your presence.
There are currently two islands that you can explore, each with its own set of resources you can use. Even so, there is a lot to expect as Nested Lands continues to develop. And their road map has some promising features to look forward to.
There is a new island in the works to add new resources, enemies, and locations to explore. They are planning new gear and clothing to help combat these new threats, and new features like animal husbandry, expeditions, and potentially fishing as well.
Now, Nested Lands is still in early access, so I ran into some bugs in my time of playing it. The first was arrows felt inconsistent when firing them. Whether it be at an enemy or a plague site. This made the bow hard to use and a bit frustrating to handle at times. Considering this is a key way of dealing with the plague, this is an issue.
The next is that I have had resources float away on me at times. This made collecting them frustrating at times, as they would be unreachable by my villagers or me. And was highly present with plague sites, as I would see the drops just float away as I waited for the plague area to drop.
Now, at the time of writing this, they have patched the bow and arrow glitch, making it easier to work with. This shows me that the devs are actively looking for feedback and fixing bugs when they are found. This gives me hope that Nested Lands will turn out to be great, or at least on the road to becoming so.
With all that being said, Nested Lands is a fun yet challenging experience to play. While trying to find the right balance of exploration and town management, I look forward to seeing what comes next in these crazy lands we find ourselves in.