Manor Lords is a solid, very grounded medieval town building game.

There's two main parts I think make this game:

The fully gridless building system is fantastic. Tbh Cities Skylines kinda ruined most city building games for me in that regard, and this pushes that formula even further with the dynamic zoning and zone sizes giving more building options.
There's nothing stopping you from making USA suburbs-like grids, but if you build looser, the result is very beautiful and authentic feeling.

The other part is the sheer amount of detail, construction progress, moving of logs with oxen, everything. It's very satisfying and playing on 1x speed is very comfy, unlike in most games where you're just sitting with max speed waiting for resources.


For the few negatives, and this is just me, the limited scope does hurt a little bit.
It's definitely a TOWN building game and not a CITY building game. No stone wall, stone roads, proper castles or stuff like that.
I do respect the limited scope for a solo dev, but this does limit the replayability for me, since every village will more or less look and feel the same.
And I don't like that the bandit robberies just teleport stuff out of your stockpile, there definitely should be a way to stop that with guards or something.

It's an early access and it is clearly missing some stuff and imo need balance changes, but that's small stuff and I like it quite a bit. 4/5