The idea of developing sound and well placed infrastructure in a contemporary city fills me with an overwhelming sense of incompetency, so for the most part I tend to steer clear of city builders of that ilk. I don’t want to care about where a hospital needs to go, or how many roads is too many! So something like Thveit, a Norse folklore inspired city builder where the changing seasons shape how your villagers work, seems a bit more my speed.

In Thveit, you start off with just a small group of folks setting up their life in a small forest clearing, slowly building up your homestead. Over time, you start to pad it out with buildings, and can send off your villagers to grow veggies, tend to livestock, the usual kind of thing, with what looks like some resource management mixed in there too. What sounds quite unique about it are the two bits I mentioned above, the use of seasons and folklore.

On the seasonal front, this is something you have to take into consideration when building your village. Ensuring that your villagers are well fed, are warm, have good clothing and the like is essential to their survival. Spring is a time for harvesting your crops, summer is good for building, autumn is good for storing up food, clothes, fuel and offerings, and winter is where you find out if you did a good enough job in the previous three seasons.

Then comes the folklore side of things. There’s a bunch of Norse beasties to be found across the land you inhabit, some of which also need somewhere to live. So, for example, you might need to build some troll dens, or you could raise up a dragon from an egg, and you may want to set up places of worship like shrines to honour the gods. The beasties like trolls have their own needs, but if you help them out, they’ll help you out too, through carrying heavier things like wood and stone.

As of right now, Thveit doesn’t have a release date, but whenever it does launch it’ll do so in early access. You can wishlist it on Steam here.