dotAGE

This game is a 10/10 for me.

If you want to play a cute pixel-art city builder and vibe with great music, this game is for you.

If you're a resource management worker placement board game nerd, this is the game for you.

If you want to ramp the difficulty have an insanely challenging survival game that makes you plan every turn meticulously, this is the game for you.

This game is for you.

One of my new favourite games ever - combines the one more turn feeling of Civ, the colony management of Rimworld, and roguelike randomness and goals of Against the Storm.

Brilliant game that I can lose many hours in without noticing the time.

Created by a solo dev who is highly engaged with the players on discord.

This game is advertised as merciless. There's a difference between merciless and downright stupid and impossible. I like this game, but some of the elders are unplayable even on the easiest, slowest difficulty. And the elders that are playable have too steep a difficulty curve, where one setting is so easy its boring and the next up is aggravating. Dotage would benefit greatly from being able to adjust and fine-tune these settings to one's liking.

Parts of the game feel unfinished, particularly the elder's dialogue. Aside from a few starting lines, they all share the same dialogue as the first. Why does the shaman start out super nice and friendly, then switch to insulting and belittling everyone like Matus?

Great game with good replayability. Game building and playing style changed by character and map every time when replay.

I absolutely LOVE this game! There is so much love and polish put into the gameplay and art here. I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoyed Against the Storm, Simmiland, Banished or Settlement Survival. It has the depth of all those games and really rewards persistence. The meta-unlock tree is much longer than one might expect from the super reasonable price point for this game and unlocking a new crop or building for future attempts feels great. The different Elders also have unique playstyles that make you change up the approaches you've become comfortable with at that point. Having the doom events and seasons randomised can be a real gut-shot at times but fortune favours the prepared! 10/10 game. Please make more

yuhh

Unhealthily addicting and quite endlessly re-playable (if you take breaks). Might not be for everyone though since turns could take minutes (or that's just me)

Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer

Wonderful little game. Can't stop playing!

Great!

After 52 hours I think I get what this game is about.

This game has 2 sides.

On one side, it looks like a cute city-builder, and the art style seems rather cute and peaceful.

On the other side, this game is very random and very violent at times.

Finally, the pacing in this game is very very bad.

Consider that a typical game is around 280 turns long. That's probably like over 10 hours.

During that 10 hours, pretty much nothing bad will happen to your village. Then somehow all at once, everyone will freeze, and a landslide will kill everyone who is frozen, and you won't have enough space to bury everyone (not even close) by the few survivors, and then that's it, It's all gone.

And you could have been doing everything right, as far as you knew. There was no time to correct your mistake, it's just all gone and it seemed stable.

I have beaten this game (without anyone dying!) so I found the right way to do things, but it is pretty time consuming.

Overall that is a trap that some roguelikes fall into. They make really long runs, and this one is probably the longest I have played. Slay the Spire, if you win it's like 50 min, if you lose it's like 30, perfect. This game, if you win it's like 10+ hours, and if you lose, it's still 10+ hours. Throwing that much randomness into something so time consuming to build is kind of not great. So consider that.

Overall despite the pacing issue, this game has cute art and music and a lot of heart went into making it. And it is fun to play and addictive. So I will give a thumbs up. Give it a try but prepare for some frustration.

Hard, but addictive worker placement and resource management game with a nice SNES visual style. Highly recommended!

Great game, but not to my tastes. Kinda in between a video and board game, while I prefer one or the other. The game length even on fastest is still 4-5 hours, which is too long for a casual session yet the chill turn-based nature of the game means that I'd rather play something more active if I had 4-5 hours to spare.

That said, I wanted to shout-out the amazing Steam Deck support, which was great time while on a flight (played offline so my hours aren't counted). I suggest you give this game a go if you want a chill game to play while on a 6+ hour flight!

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Big game with lots of unlockables, chill with turns but deep in micromanagement. Totally recommended!

Very addictive; very fun.

This game deserves way more attention. Very well-thought basebuilder with "one more turn" case

This game is pure crack cocaine and deserves more reviews. Also stinking cute.

This is such an awesome little town-sim.

You get the usual resource management. Food, materials, tools, but where it really shines is in how you confront the threat of your environment. It's incredibly simple in principle, getting points in your "Domains" to counteract a domain's threats and doom, so you never feel lost. But also challenging in process, as you have balance your growth with surviving each threat (and trust me... you eventually won't. But it's always fun trying.)

Throw in the everlasting issue that is the Elder's memory, through whom the story of your town is told, and you have a neat progression system from run-to-run that makes for awesome and replay-ability, with a rouge-like RNG system.

I don't remember last time I was consumed as much by a roguelike game, although I played a couple of dozens of them.

Brilliant, unforgiving, hilarious!

fo shizzle

*(This is a vibes-based review.)*

The dotAGE x Against the Storm collab brought me here. I love Against the Storm, but I'm hanging this one up after only a few hours.

My biggest critique, especially for a game in this review tier, is its lack of polish, which makes the slow progression difficult to endure.

Vibes

At the time of writing this, dotAGE is sitting on the edge of Overwhelmingly Positive at 95%. That is GLOWING praise and super impressive. Seriously, here are some solo-dev games in that tier: Stardew Valley, Balatro, Papers Please, Undertale, Katana ZERO, Animal Well, Inscryption. These games all share one thing in common: even when they genre-mash, they deliver something harmonious.

I have a lot of admiration and respect for indie devs, but the dotAGE vibe is... undercooked. I went into dotAGE hoping to find that Overwhelmingly Positive 95%+ sauce, but I never did. The short cutscenes, dialogue, and story elements are reminiscent of Stardew Valley but they feel repetitive and unmemorable. Cobalt Core is a game that does short dialogue so well; even without a deep narrative, the occasional quips in that game add so much to the experience. I feel like that's what dotAGE is going for with the "You fools!" etc etc. Unfortunately, dotAGE doesn’t quite strike that balance for me. The sound design of dotAGE has an intentionally crusty and quirky aesthetic, which I can appreciate, but it feels like it doesn't align with the rest of the game. There is clearly *something* cooking here, but it's thin and chaotic. I wish I could offer more specific feedback than "it feels off," but that’s the crux of it. Sadly, my most enjoyable time playing dotAGE was when I started skipping animations, turned off the in-game sounds, and listened to a playlist of themes from other games.

Progression

Lastly, as a casual player, I found the progression system slow, daunting, and opaque. If you enjoy turn-based games because you like to take your time, be prepared for a single dotAGE game to stretch over many, many hours while unlocking only a few interesting new things. Many gameplay systems, buildings, animals, and crops etc are locked until you earn enough currency to unlock them. That's fine, but meaningful choices are rare. The unlock page is essentially a linear slideshow of Who's-That-Pokémon silhouette images + "???" text. It’s almost impossible to feel invested in progressing when you only have a vague sense of what lies ahead. I wonder how long it would take to unlock all the elders and memories at my snail pace? 200 hours? I put the game down when I realised I had very few new things to look forward to in my next game.

Final thoughts

I have no doubts that dotAGE is rewarding for fans of the colony-sim genre. I was drawn in by glowing reviews, turn-based mechanics, and cute art, hoping for an indie-gem experience. I wouldn't do it again. That said, if you're someone who really values depth and substance over polish, you might actually love dotAGE. I just happen to prefer more curated experiences, and I feel like dotAGE could benefit from more refinement and cohesion to match its acclaim among the indie greats.

I love this game. It's actually very engaging, has lots of replayability, and, if you want it to, can be super challenging.

Yes.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☑ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☑ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☑ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

---{ Author }---
☑ https://vojtastruhar.github.io/steam-review-template

Super fun and addictive

is very nice

Genuinely fun game. I find most kingdom-builders to be too grand in scale, often including many elements that don't mesh well or were poorly balanced. This game's simplicity is what allows it to have a lot of depth in its strategy and gameplay. It's just an all-around good time if you enjoy these kinds of games but also find them to be exhausting to play.

This little city builder roguelike is really clever in how it's put together. It starts out very simple and straightforward, and rapidly becomes complex as you progress. It is also quite challenging! I recommend playing on easier difficulty for your first village or two to learn the mechanics and pacing of the game, and then ramping up the difficulty to your desired challenge level. I see that the solo dev is very active and responsive to community feedback, and the level of thought, care and craftsmanship poured into this game is apparent. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys city builder, management and colony sim games looking for something new! Although be warned that this game is very addictive and has a serious "one more turn" problem on par with the Civilization series.

Fun and extremely replayable survival builder. Definitely check it out if you're into this sort of games. Graphics are a lil ugly even for pixelated art, so care there

the game is good but unfortunately i came back to it like months and months later and trying to play my save file softlocked the game because of i assume who was my last save was santa and so i tried to delete the run but i couldnt find a way to delete it without deleting my profile :/



I really hope after revisiting this game so much time later other things like a certain event that was practically a run killer every time you got it isn't a thing anymore because from what i remember it gave x amount of pips a debuff for a long ass time and required a certain building you would most likely not get in that time frame because the pips would be cured by then or you would be dead because those afflicted pips would still consume food but contribute nothing , it was really a game ending event super early.

Reply to Dev

I'm not sure what it was exactly called but i think it might of been injured and it would put 1-3 i vaguely remember pips out of commission for 20 days and the building need to cure it i remembered at the time was a medical building that required a bourgeois to run it and it just felt at the time impossible to cure it within that time early game if it happened and in the worst case it was better to restart and if it happened late game it was salvageable or not enough of an issue. I just found if 2 or more pips got afflicted by this ailment it was better to restart but it seems like the event is gone now because i used to get it quite often or replaced by the stunned event which feels better if thats the case.

Also i wouldn't worry too much about my save its already gone and it honestly it's not a deal breaker for me because i do love the game i really dont mind starting over it was more of a mild disappointment that my old save was buggered but i do appreciate the offer to help me fix it but i should be all good.

I do plan to ge the dlc when it comes out and i look forward to playing as fish ppl it seems very fun that we get more fantasy races coming out in the future.

What a charming 'little' game this ended up being. Citybuilder with boardgame-like elements with a bit of roguelite fun in your short-term goals to plan for, alongside some meta unlocks that add more to the game overall, makes a remarkably enjoyable game. Tutorial is great, holds your hand just enough for you to get your feet wet without getting intimidated, and then has no hesitation in throwing you to the wolves once it knows you can handle it.

My only complaint is that Normal felt a little too easy, especially in the midgame. I felt like I was cruising for a solid 8 hours straight in my first playthrough towards the endgame. Eager to see what higher difficulties bring, though!

Game is great, tons of crazy situations to get your village out of...but also the resources to be able to do it.

Very fun city builder with a unique story!

Definitely does not deserve the overwhelmingly possible tag.
Menu is awkwardly placed.
It uses way too much processing power for my pc considering the graphics.
Music is weird
Depends way too much un luck just to beat the game.
Each game is waay too long.
The game can doom you and end your game with an unlucky roll of dice.

progression is too slow. I almost hit 30 hours and have only unlocked 50% of the content. and the runs take too long, that playtime is one win on normal and one win on hard.

This is one of those games where you want to play for 1-2 hours and then suddenly it's 5 AM.

Fantastic game, very replayable, very "one more turn"able, enough to unlock and enough different on each run to keep it interesting.

Literally my only complaints are the UI - I wish it showed you more clearly which jobs are being worked and which are idle, like how in a board game like Agricola you can just look at the places to put pips and see what's being worked. Once you have a busy town it's easy to forget that you're working a job you don't need any more or miss that a job has stopped, for example if its inputs ran out. I almost wish there was a separate screen for assigning pips to jobs.

The animations are too slow, even with faster animations on. A lot of the animations run at regular speed even with that option on. I also get some weird freezes, like I got the Eureka event and the camera zoomed to a pip who stood there for several seconds before it started the event animation. But the super fast option skips too much!

These are very minor complaints overall though and it's an excellent game!

It is a cute game but hard to master. The number of tile improvements and citizens' jobs is huge, which can be overwhelming (and I have unlocked just like half of the content!). Unfortunately, sometimes it feels that it's just complexity for the sake of complexity, without a sense of progress by unlocking different mechanics or actions. Overall, it's a nice experience, but I won't be spending hundreds of hours to see all the game has offer.

Got this as part of the bundle with Against the Storm and let me tell you, the other game is vastly superior to this.

This starts out amazing. The amount of depth and ease of use is very addicting. However, it becomes waaaay too tedious to manage and assign pips to their jobs. Chances are you will not have enough pips to do everything the first time you play this game so you will do a lot of assigning/unassigning to counter the prophecies. I am no game dev but it would be awesome to have a way to automatically assign pips based on priorities.

And also I was intrigued by this at first as I love city builders and even more so roguelikes/lites but this is too long to be a replayable roguelike. Also most of the time, you don't get much choice on how to progress as you will have to focus on countering the prophecies which the game takes control of, not you. If you choose not to focus on them then you are pretty much doomed as most of the negative outcomes are game ending if they pile up.

Now saying that, I appreciate the solo dev for this game and I understand the effort that went into this. I am still playing this and want to continue with my first run so my opinions might change but for now I just came across the aforementioned hiccups that hinder me from fully enjoying this.

A very simple game at that allows you to delve into complex gameplay mechanics at your own pace.

Dotage is a city builder, and it has procedurally generated elements that increase in number through unlocks as you play and can change the shape of your runs, but a single run is long enough that it doesn't really feel like a roguelite to me. Like, technically I would put it in that category, but while you can hop in and play for a short while and hop out again pretty easily, that's because it's turn based.

I think what really makes this so engaging is that it always keeps a few short term goals in front of you. It's more guided than a city builder typically is, and so for people who like the idea of city builders but struggle to know what to do with one, this is a good choice. You don't know exactly what will happen, but you know when and what kind of problem that you'll have, so you can prepare to field the danger.

I don't normally wait and review a game after 37 hours of game time, and I think the reason that's happened here is largely because it's hard to put into words how Dotage is so engaging. The recent crossover with Against the Storm has made it a bit easier to explain: it's more guided than a city builder typically is. Like Against the Storm, Dotage procedurally generates goals for you along the way so that you never lack direction. How it achieves this is very different from Against the Storm, but it's the same kind of extra oomph that I needed to really sink into a city builder.

And then there's the way buildings interact with each other. Placing new buildings is a puzzle. Everything is on a grid; some buildings require certain resources within a certain distance, others require some kind of production within a certain distance, some require different types of constructed ground, some have to be connected to the town center by a certain type of constructed ground. So as you unlock new buildings, you have to figure out how the heck you can fit it into the metropolis you've already built.

Meanwhile, the UI does a good job of telling you exactly what your inflows and outflows of resources and food are so you can balance all the needs of the community you've built.

My only real complaint about the game is that I'd like to be able to hit a button and cycle through all of my buildings of a given type. Right now, if you click a button, any on your screen will flash, but the town gets so visually busy that that's not really very useful.

But yeah, I am really enjoying this and expect to play it for a long time to come.

Probably the worst game I've played this year, I was having fun at first but the game has very poor tutorials, they either barely help you at all or force you into doing things in the game that you don't want to do or are unable to do and you can't turn tutorials off as far as I'm aware, my game is completely broken where certain options do not show up and I'm stuck needing to complete a tutorial that I'm unable to complete and I can't progress my game until I complete this tutorial which as I said I cannot complete because the option does not show up for me. I'll change my review if this is fixed but major problems like this really shouldn't be happening since this game has been out for over a year at this point, I have never played a game where a bug completely breaks the game and makes you unable to progress.

Update-
I found a way to work around the issue, I did do a bug report so hopefully this issue will be fixed so others don't encounter it and get stuck like I did, I appreciate the response from the developer! :)

Just "finished" my first run and 12 hours has passed. Haven't been so enthralled on a game for such a long time that I didn't notice time passing.

DotAge is an amazing village survival that perfectly captures the atmosphere. I found this due to the collaboration with Against the Storm and I'm so glad that that happened. I was wondering if there would be another builder game that captures AtS' feel and this does it perfectly. The number of unlocks is honestly staggering and the value for content that I know I'll be getting with this game will be a lot. Already on a second run and looking forward for more!

Simply one of the finest colony sims ever designed. There are so many pieces to this game and they fit together so nicely. This will easily be a 100+ hour game for me.

The sound and music could be better. Not a huge fan of the "authentic" medieval music after a few hours, and the UI makes way too much noise. Minor gripes about an otherwise stellar game.

Runs are way too long, they lost my interest before I finished a single one (which took six hours)

yes

Great roguelite city builder! It looks cute and relaxing on the surface, but it is very challenging.
The rounds are usually rather long. My only win so far with the first elder was 8-9 hours if I remember correctly. But recently (I think, I don't remember it being there last time I played), options for a shorter or longer game were introduced. I believe also some elders (which you need to unlock first) have different game lengths.

The randomness in this game feels good to me. It makes things interesting, but there is usually a way to prevent bad random things from happening or you can prepare to deal with them when certain things, like sickness, arise.
The prophecy and the visions of the elder give you direction, so you get a good idea about what to focus on next.

Replayability is very high, not only because you unlock stuff over time, but also there are multiple elders you can play with, which means different kinds of worlds and buildings, plus even for the same elder, buildings aren't always the same. You always have the same kind of buildings, e.g. a water source, but sometimes it's a well you build on flat land, other times it's a mountain spring you have to place in the mountains. The research building sometimes has to be close to a house, sometimes it's most productive when there's nothing around, and so on... You can't just stick to the same strategy every time, you have to adapt.

The developer is still actively working on it and there are regular updates.

as an avowed city builder player, i genuinely believe this is one of the greatest games i've ever played. the fundamentally simple gameplay loop, graduated complexity, thoughtful mechanics, satisfying synergies, and tangible love from the developer all come together to create something that stands out like a north star in its genre.

i also really like the considered way that the game's mechanics are revealed to you gradually across runs, rather than just dropping you into the deep end immediately. the complexity ceiling on this game is somewhat high, but it is drip-fed to you across time and you are in control of which new mechanics are unlocked and when, so you're never forced out of your depth.

this is a game about micromanagement; the mechanics also strongly incentivize a high pip population. the logical conclusion here is that optimal play rapidly becomes very, very micro-intensive. there is some appeal to this but at a certain point some of it does feel tedious. the developer has done a good job addressing this so far, for example through UI changes or the ability to hasten the endgame, but it's not all the way there yet in my opinion. this really stands out in the pip assignment process. it would be really nice if there was a button to prioritize the production of a resource (or multiple?), shuffling around your pips optimally. i don't claim this change would be simple but i think it would improve the fluency of the game a lot.

overall though this game rules and i can't recommend it enough. i was an early player and it has pleased me so much to see how much love it's gotten, and i'm really happy to see the developer continuing to give it love via the just-announced DLC. looking forward to supporting him again.

Game is fine, not great, not amazing, but fine. It is certainly not worth full price, but heavily consider picking it up on a deep discount.