Virtual Villagers is a casual game created by independent game studio Last Day of Work. It features a tribe of little people who survive a shipwreck and must build a new life on the island of Isola. It has four sequels; Virtual Villagers 2: The Lost Children, Virtual Villagers 3: Secret City, Virtual Villagers 4: The Tree of Life, and Virtual Villagers 5: New Believers, along with the spin-offs "Virtual Families", "Virtual Families 2". "Virtual Town", and eventually "Virtual Families 3".
- Virtual Villagers: A New Home takes place after a volcano eruption destroys the island that a small tribe lived on. They escape in boats and float for days before crashing onto the beautiful island of Isola. Once there, you must build a tribe while solving puzzles to unlock the mysteries of Isola. It has been remade as Virtual Villagers Origins for iOS/Android in 2012.
- Virtual Villagers 2: The Lost Children: Two Too Dumb to Live villagers venture into a cave and fall down a waterfall, landing on the western shore of Isola, where they find some lost children. They begin making a new tribe there while discovering more mysteries. A lot of people thought this ended the series, but it made
money, so: - Virtual Villagers 3: Secret City: A group of villagers venture to the northern shore of Isola, where they find an abandoned civilization. They decide to make a new tribe there and discover more mysteries of Isola. It's not over yet folks.
- Virtual Villagers 4: The Tree of Life: This game received a mixed reaction. The Tree of Life features, what else, a tree of life on the eastern shore of Isola that your villagers have to nurture back to health. This was the very first game that you could select what villagers you wanted to start out with.
- Virtual Villagers 5: The New Believers: The most recent game, New Believers finally makes the player a literal god, as they have to get the "heathen" original inhabitants of Isola living in the island's center to believe in them, a giant flying hand god which is worshiped by the villagers. Guess how it ends. Just take a wild guess.
- Virtual Villagers Origins 2: Technically not a sequel, it is more of a reboot. Released in 2017 after 7 years. Released exclusively for iOS/Android.
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Tropes in the series
- A Child Shall Lead Them: The Golden Child in the first game. In the third game, The Secret City, it's possible for a child to become chief of the tribe. New Believers introduces god powers that include youth restoration, allowing you to turn a village chief into a child.
- Aerith and Bob: Very very common in the Virtual Families series. You get names like "Bingono", "Gregetto", "Crisino", and, occasionally "normal" names like Sophie, Chad, and Chip.
- A God Is You: Implicit in the first four games, but explicit in the fifth, New Believers, where the player has to convert a tribe of 'heathens' to the worship of the 'Guiding Hand' (that is, the player).
- Always Identical Twins: Occasionally a mother will have twins or (rarely) triplets. They are simply clones of each other.
- Anti-Frustration Features: In Virtual Families 2, pets (which are expensive to purchase) are immortal. They won't starve to death, and they'll survive each passing generation.
- Artificial Stupidity: If your villagers are hungry, instead of doing something like gathering more food or researching so a different way to bring in food can be discovered, they'll wander around worrying about being hungry. They'll even actually leave jobs they've been assigned just to walk around worrying.
- Brand X:
- In Virtual Families 2 and 3, people get emails about Fakebook statuses from their friends.
- Virtual Families 3 lets you use the dating app Cinder to find potential spouses.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Virtual Villagers Origins and its sequel have in-app purchases that let you replenish your food supply or instantly gain more tech points.
- Capcom Sequel Stagnation: And how. Almost nothing changes between games, though. It is just an island simulator.
- The Chosen One: The Golden Child in the first game, who will bring peace and fortune to the villagers. In the fifth game, it's revealed that at some point he went missing.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The heathen villagers in New Believers wear colored masks signifying their rank.
- Blue (Heathen Villagers): These villagers are completely docile and carry out tasks similar to your own villagers. They can be converted by having a devotee "explain the truth" to them, but you have to wait for a cooldown period before trying again afterwards or they'll just run away.
- Yellow (Heathen Guards): Unlike their blue-masked brethren, yellow-masked heathens will actively chase your villagers if they get too close to their guarded areas, causing your villager to stop what they're doing and run away. They can only be converted by using the Earthquake power several times.
- Red (Senior Heathen Guards): While the red-masked heathens are fully docile, their masks are so terrifying to your villagers that they will immediately run away if they get too close to them. These heathens can also only be converted by using the Earthquake power.
- Purple (Heathen Masters): Only four of these heathens exist, one in each major area of the village (ie. farm, research lab, mausoleum, and hospital). Converting them involves a specific task for each of them: healing the Heathen Doctor, rebuilding the ruined aqueduct for the Heathen Farmer, impressing the Heathen Scientist with a scientific problem three times, and beating the Heathen Builder in a building contest by using the Time Warp Power.
- The Heathen Chief is the leader of the heathens and is distinguished by his decorative mask. He is usually found at the northeastern corner of the village which is hidden behind the bushes and he sometimes comes out of there. He's a Master of All and converting him will require all purple masked Heathens to be converted and his daughter’s necklace fully reassembled. Like the purple masked Heathens, he's unaggressive and will not affect your villagers. Upon his conversion, it’s heavily implied that his daughter was the girl from the “forbidden love" story in The Secret City.
- Death of a Child: Implied with the ghost girl in Virtual Families 3. A letter mentions that she died in a freak accident (and further random events reveal that she drowned on thin ice) before your little people move in and can only be put to rest by finding her doll.
- Children can die of sickness or starvation during the game, and if a nursing villager dies, her baby will too.
- Dismantled MacGuffin: The Gong in Virtual Villagers 2, the necklace in Virtual Villagers 5.
- Early Game Hell: Most of the early game can be rough trying to train most of the villagers, as being untrained has a high failure rate, but the higher the experience goes, the lower the failure rate. This is made even more so that your food sources at the start are expendable, as the first food sources you get in the beginning are finite.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: A villager's likes and dislikes aren't just for show; they also affect how often they'll interact with certain objects on the island. In fact, they'll refuse to interact with an object if they dislike it—villagers who dislike swimming will run out of the water if put in it, for instance.
- G-Rated Sex: When you drop your villagers on another villager of the opposite gender, a kiss sound is played, the two will head to the shack, and the woman will come out with a baby. Occasionally before the male even gets to the shack, she will come out with a baby.
- If the female is prevented from going to the shack, the baby will appear out of thin air in the mother's arms, fully dressed in swaddling clothes, which she will look after for two whole years.
- In Virtual Families, when a couple "tries to make a baby," they go to their bedroom, the woman throws rose petals on the bed while the man jumps up and down excitedly, and then they stand on the bed hugging and smiling with their eyes closed. PG-Rated Sex, perhaps?
- Gotta Catch 'Em All: The collectibles, which allow you to have a greater population for each completed set. Only children can gather them since they'll focus more on their jobs upon reaching working age (14). The fourth game gives the collectibles a unique purpose and a +5 limit to the population for each finished collection.
- Finding all the wind flutes allows rarer collectibles to be found when the mist comes in every two in-game hours.
- Finding all the lab gear makes scientists much more productive (produce more tech points).
- Finding all the fish scales lets golden fish appear in fish nets.
- Finding all the mausoleum pieces lets villagers' ghosts appear at random times and point out rare collectibles.
- Guide Dang It!: Virtual Villagers 5: New Believers never directly explained to players how to convert red and yellow heathens, only blue ones.
- Virtual Families 3 can become slightly annoying with the ghost girl, who will always randomly appear looking for her doll. The doll is part of the toy collection but will never spawn normally—a random event must occur where a character is actively searching for it.
- Guilt-Based Gaming: If you leave your villagers alone for too long, you're likely to return to nothing but skeletons. In the Virtual Families games, one of the adults in the household will send you an email asking where you've been, and that they thought you weren't coming back to take care of them anymore.
- Hidden Depths: Though it can be missable, the Virtual Villagers and Virtual Families series have some semi-complex lore.
- The island of Isola from Virtual Villagers faced lots of ruin and tragedy during its ancient days. At some point, all the regions of the island were lively and inhabited until "the forbidden love", which led to many deaths and displacements, including the destruction of a gong.
- The second Virtual Families game features Bill and Margaret, the previous owners, who were planning to build and renovate a house for a large family of their own someday. However, due to unknown circumstances, Margaret refused to adopt children, and Bill soon died. His funeral/wake was held inside one of the rooms of the house (which your characters may sometimes smell for some reason). Following Margaret's death, squatters moved in and vandalized the house, which was eventually damaged by the elements and age.
- The third Virtual Families game features previous owners Kevin and Rachel, who lived in the house with their daughter, who was five. Tragically, the little girl drowned while skating on thin ice and her bereaved parents eventually moved away but left her favorite doll behind. She now haunts the house, looking for it endlessly, which is something random events touch on every now and again.
- No Antagonist: Averted in New Believers, where the masked villagers nicknamed heathens will oppose you and guard most of the areas. The ones wearing yellow masks in particular will actively chase your villagers away if they get too close to their guarded areas.
- Random Event: Sometimes, random events happen as you play the games, which may give you extra food, boost a villager's skills, or kill them, for example. Some of these events give you choices that give you different results. In the earlier games, some of the events could actually kill your villagers or otherwise remove them from the tribe permanently.
- Same Plot Sequel: Virtual Villagers Origins 2 follows the same structure as Virtual Villagers 1: A New Home, where a bunch of people flee from an island due to a volcano erupting and end up on an island they nickname Isola.
- Sequel Hook: At the end of Virtual Villagers 4, an abandoned mask is seen afterward. In general, though each ending adds more to the lore and things to discover.
- Shout-Out:
- The fish of fertility from Virtual Villagers: A New Home is the same fish of fertility from Fish Tycoon. Likewise, the plants and fish you are trying to discover in Plant Tycoon and Fish Tycoon come from Isola, as are the bottled weather effects you can get in the Virtual Families games.
- The environment and lore of "Virtual Villagers: Origins 2" are chock full of references to the Cthulhu Mythos.
- One of the early puzzles is a ritual where four of your villagers worship in front of a Kraken Statue with a tentacle-bearded humanoid face.
- Another early puzzle involves removing a giant stone from a pond in the center of the island, through which a giant squid emerges. The last puzzle in the first act of the gameis a complex ritual to drive it away. The second act of the game opens with a volcanic eruption that destroys most of the buildings on the island and alters its landscape. The exposition character attributes it to the anger of "the Old Ones."
- One random pop-up event is a mashup reference to "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Nameless City." Another is titled "Colors Out of Space." In a third, a text under a drawing of people being terrorized by a monster can be translated to read, "From the depths of ocean’s keep, awoke the thing from endless sleep!"
- The kraken-repelling ritual puzzle in Virtual Villagers Origins 2 recapitulates several mid-game puzzles from the third and fourth original-series games.
- Star-Crossed Lovers: The chief and the princess from The Secret City were members of the opposing Nature and Magic factions who fell in love despite the conflicts between their tribes. When the factions discovered this forbidden romance, the tribes went to war and their civilization fell to ruin. The remaining members of the civilization would later become the heathens from New Believers.
- Super-Speed: A villager who likes running moves faster than the others on the map, which is useful in getting tasks done faster. On the other hand, a villager who dislikes running moves like molasses.
- Surprise Incest: Your villagers have zero qualms about breeding with their relatives, so you may leave the game running for a while and return to find that two villagers engaged in a little inbreeding while you weren't looking. It's not as prevalent from Virtual Villagers 2 onwards, as that game introduced a lineage mechanic that showed who a child's parents are, making it easier to keep track of who is related to whom (though that doesn't stop the incest from occurring, intentionally or otherwise, because the relationships are cleared upon a child becoming an adult).
- Video Game Caring Potential: Unsurprisingly, given its status as a Simulation Game. These people have names and to a certain extent even personalities. You see their lives from infancy to old age. It's possible to get very attached to particular villagers, or to your village as a whole.
