It seems indie publisher Hooded Horse knows how to pick 'em. After the absurdly successful launch of Manor Lords, the label is putting out another medieval strategy game with a big city-building element in the form of Norland, which has just crossed 500,000 wishlists on Steam ahead of its Early Access launch.
Norland is a "medieval colony sim" where you build a kingdom from the ground up in the style of a game like RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress. There's a massive emphasis on showing the needs and emotions of both your ruling family and the peasants they reign over, to the point where everything from hunger to sex drive is simulated in-game. And, of course, there are other fledgling kingdoms to compete against, which means there's lots of hands to shake and backs to stab along the way.
The game has been in the works for years at developer Long Jaunt, with regular community playtests along the way to help deepen its mechanics. Norland had previously been scheduled to hit Early Access as of May 16, but it's just been delayed to July 18, which will allow for an extensive range of simulation and quality-of-life improvements, detailed in a Steam blog, to hit the game before it reaches a wider audience.
In a press release accompanying the delay announcement, Hooded Horse revealed that Norland had just crossed 500,000 wishlists. If you check the rankings over at SteamDB, that makes it the #41 most-wishlisted upcoming game on Steam, not far behind the likes of Deltarune, Slay the Spire 2, and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater.
Check out all the best city-building games out there.
After 2.5 million sales, Manor Lords publisher says it "would almost be arrogant" to not be surprised by the city builder's success - but "you cannot count on it to repeat"
Overthrown is a unique sandbox game "relative to most of the genre," with an ever-changing world that separates itself from genre giants like Minecraft
