Lonesome Village is a Life Simulation Game by developer Ogre Pixel funded via Kickstarter. The game has been described by the developers as a combination of the life simulation of the Animal Crossing series with the puzzle-solving and dungeon exploration of The Legend of Zelda.
The story of the game follows Wes the coyote as he arrives in the titular village to find that all of its citizens have disappeared following the appearance of a strange tower. Now he must conciliate adjusting to his new life in town with exploring the tower to find and rescue the missing villagers, while also learning not only the truth about what happened, but also about a calamity long ago that wiped out the town that once existed where Lonesome Village now stands, and a mysterious cult that may be related to both occurrences...
As players take control of Wes, gameplay inside the tower is focused largely on puzzle-solving, while the time in town can be spent on more relaxing activies such as fishing, gardening, exploring, and interacting with villagers. By befriending villagers, Wes can gradually unlock new areas of the tower in order to progress the story.
After being initially released as a demo, the full game came out on November 1, 2022 for Steam and Nintendo Switch. Its Steam page can be found here
. You can also find its official website here, and read more about it on its Kickstarter page. See also the announcent trailer for Nintendo Switch.
Lonesome Village includes examples of:
- Archnemesis Dad: Baran is Wes's father.
- Big Bad: Baran
- Block Puzzle: Many of the puzzles involve sliding blocks around.
- Blue Is Heroic: Wes' default outfit is a blue tunic that looks rather like Link's in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
- Broken Bridge: You'll have to work with some of the townspeople to fix bridges or get past blocks to get access to the other areas of the village.
- Cats Are Magic: Sabrina, one of the witches who live in the forest, is a black cat.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Mocty the Xolo is the village gravekeeper and wears a shirt with a skull pattern, but his outfit also includes a bright flower necklace and he is one of the friendliest villagers around.
- Evil Tower of Ominousness: Part of the game involves exploring a tall, dark, and spooky tower. The Steam page explains that this tower (or at least, a very similar one) once belonged to the ancient town of Ubhora, which is now Lonesome Village. The old tower suddenly disappeared, and all the townspeople with it. The disappearances were attributed to a mysterious organization known simply as The Cult.
- 15 Puzzle: There is one to solve at the top of the tower.
- Final-Exam Boss: In the second phase of the final battle, the player has to redo several of the puzzles they've solved throughout the game in succession. The kicker being that, this time, there's a time limit, as you have to complete the puzzles before Baran finishes charging his attacks.
- Fishing Minigame: The player can catch fish in the lake in town or at the beach. There are three different fishing rods that can be obtained, with Earl giving you the first one near the beginning of the game, and which one you use, as well as the location and the time (day or night) determines which types of fish you can catch.
- Floating Limbs: The game's art style depicts the characters with round hands and no visible arms.
- Frictionless Ice: Part of the final puzzle at the top of the tower.
- Heroic Mime: Wes never talks throughout the game.
- Incredible Shrinking Man: In the Mouse Maze puzzle, entering a certain door causes Wes to shrink in size, allowing him to get through passages that would normally be too small for him to fit into.
- In-Universe Game Clock: The game has a day-night cycle that passes according to an internal clock, shown in the upper right corner of the screen. Villagers may be found in different places depending on the time, and some things like certain kinds of fish can only be found at certain times of day.
- Item Crafting: Several variations of this exist in the game, and many of the items needed for sidequests can only be obtained this way.
- Different kinds of wooden logs and branches from trees can be taken to Justin and crafted into furniture.
- Robert the blacksmith can forge iron and other kinds of ore mined with the pickaxe to create metallic objects like swords and shields, though these serve only as decoration or to be given to villagers, considering the game's lack of combat.
- Row can use the gemstones the player mines with the golden pickaxe to create treasures like a gemstone ring or crystal ball.
- Raglan can cook the fruits that the player finds in the wild or grows from seeds to make several different sweets.
- Light and Mirrors Puzzle: The Cat Eyes puzzle involves pushing mirrors to reflect lasers. The same mirrors and lasers are also a major part of the final puzzle.
- Lock and Key Puzzle: Every few floors up the tower, you'll be asked to retrieve one or two items from the village to unlock the next floor.
- Magical Mystery Doors
- These are used in the Mouse Maze puzzle, with the added challenge that some doors may cause you to grow or shrink.
- Also appears in the form of the teleporters in the final puzzle.
- Make My Monster Grow: For the final battle, Baran grows to an enormous size to fight Wes on top of the tower.
- Memory Match Mini-Game
- The Canine Memory puzzle consists of this, but if you fail to get a match, all the tiles are flipped back.
- Another version can be found in the Mountain Shrine.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Upon reaching the top of the tower, Wes meets a shady figure who asks for help solving a puzzle. Once the puzzle is solved, the figure is revealed to be Baran, who steals the revealed staff, uses it to kill Hanzo, and spread evil to the town.
- One of These Doors Is Not Like the Other: The Lost Duck puzzle follows the "several identical rooms with paths facing in four directions" form of this trope. To find the correct way, you have to pay attention to the leaves floating on the water and the direction they're drifting towards.
- Pipe Maze: You have to arrange some pipes in the Bunny Potions puzzle.
- Rule of Three: Many of the puzzles have three stages with increasing difficulty in each one.
- Shell Backpack: Hanzo and Pistachio are turtles who wear clothes that don't cover their shells.
- Shout-Out: There are a few, most of them to Nintendo games:
- One of the plants in the swamp looks like a giant Piranha Plant.
- There appears to be a Yoshi egg floating in a container in Cooper's lab.
- One of the villagers is a raccoon named Rocky.
- Sabrina, the black cat witch, is most likely named after Sabrina the Teenage Witch, who has a black cat.
- "Simon Says" Mini-Game: The final part of the Band Harmony puzzle involves repeating a sequence of keys in a piano in a Simon-esque game.
- Thick-Line Animation: The game's art style uses flat colors with bold outlines.
- Those Wily Coyotes: Downplayed with Wes the coyote. He is clever enough to solve puzzles, but rather than being a trickster, he seems very kindhearted. California the merchant you rescue early on is also a coyote.
- Timed Mission: The final boss fight consists of repeats of many of the previous puzzles, but this time they have to be solved before Baran is able to finish charging his attacks.
- Toggling Setpiece Puzzle
- The Crow Luxury puzzle revolves around eye markings that can make platforms appear/disappear.
- The floor in Surfing Bird can be switched between the vertical pink paths and the horizontal blue paths.
- The paths in the Beach Shrine change as you flip switches.
- Towers of Hanoi: The Nu View puzzle is based on this, with the player using a miniature consisting of three pins and three discs to change the position of a much larger set of discs placed on three pillars in the room. By moving all the discs to the rightmost pillar, the path to the puzzle's treasure is opened.
- Virtual Paper Doll: The player can customize Wes' appearance with several different outfits that can be bought from shops or found around the village as treasure.
- Wise Old Turtle: Hanzo
- World of Funny Animals: Similarly to one of the series that inspired this game, all the characters are anthropomorphic animals. The main character, Wes, is a coyote, and the villagers seen in the game include species ranging from commonly seen animals such as cats, pigs, and an owl to rare ones like an axolotl and a sea slug.
