Foundation 1.0 (game review)
Find it here: https://www.polymorph.games/en/
Foundation is a city-builder type game, set in (rather fictional) medieval times. Apparently it has been in early access since some time in 2019, but it first came to my attention when version 1.0 was released, at the beginning of February 2025.
See various media attention at the time, for example: https://meta.masto.host/@GamingNews/113929605965146979
So far I have about... uh, way too many hours in the game for how long it's been out. Anyway, these are just my initial impressions. I have only tried the labour / taxes / trading style of play, not the 'clergy' or 'kingdom' approaches.
Overall: I like it, and would recommend it as a cute semi-casual city builder.
Positives:
The game is very cute. The little inhabitants of your village are visually very simple but as a stylistic choice it works. The cartoon villager portraits are nice. The buildings look reasonably good. There are some nice details in some of the animations, for example the way that farmers sow seeds, and later harvest the crops, is just quite neat (scythes, baby).
The initial progression is good; it's easy enough to get started, but does still require some thought and care to stay on top of things as the village grows. The tutorial quests are mostly good in the sense of keeping you moving and on a reasonable path the first time you play the game.
I like the no-grid/organic nature of the layout. This comes from free placement of buildings, the non-rectangular way that residential buildings (which are auto-placed by the villagers not directly controllable by the player), and the path-finding that controls the villager's routes (which then turn into dirt paths so you can see the commonly used routes).
It's complicated enough to need some consideration of what to do and when, but simple enough that even a bad-at-games game lover like me can do ok.
Negatives:
The 'quests' (excluding the tutorial/teach-a-particular-mechanic quests) sound nice but are often disruptive enough that it's just not worth it and better to decline the quest. It's ok to have some difficult quests, but it's a pity that the quests don't mesh better with normal city management. The ones that do mesh ok are the “village faire” type quests where you need average happiness to stay above a threshold for the period of the quest... that's kind of ok, since you want happiness to be high anyway. However even in those quests I found that if I dip below the requisite happiness percentage then there's almost no chance of recovering in time, which is not a great experience.
There is a control in the UI to let you prioritise a particular building project. As far as I can tell, this control has zero effect on anything. I don't know if it's a bug or if its effect is just so subtle that it's pointless. Also it's a toggle for each under-construction item, so you can 'prioritise' multiple things, and that's... ok I guess, but I feel like it would be simpler and more easily understood if clicking the priority button just made that item the top priority, clearing any priority orders that were previously in effect.
If you have several building projects going on (which can happen easily if you let many houses upgrade at once) then the builders appear to follow the stupidest and slowest method of ordering the work. They will gradually bring the necessary resources to each of the building sites, picking randomly (maybe? or round robin? I don't know) and bringing just a little each time. The smart way to do it is to pick a single building site, and focus all effort on that until it's done before moving to the next one. Maybe multiple sites if a single site can only be worked on by a single builder at a time. But if you have lots of upgrades happening and can't supply resources fast enough then it takes forever to dig yourself out and instead of finishing the upgrades one by one (so you can actually benefit from the finished ones earlier), it will sort of approximately finish them all at the same time (so you spend the maximum time with half-constructed houses, while your population happiness sinks like a stone because no one has anywhere to live)
I ran into bugs quickly. At least one was – effectively – game breaking for me. In this game there is a system to trade with neighbouring settlements, of which there are (as far as I can tell) a fixed set of 6. Each one needs to be unlocked for trade individually, and then once unlocked that neighbour sends a trader (a guy with a big backpack) periodically, and as their trader passes through your village he stops at your storage buildings and buys/sells stuff within limits that you set. So far, that's fine. However, I hit a bug that caused the trader to just stop at his spawn (or perhaps de-spawn) point and then do nothing else. No more trades. That's a problem, because early in the game you're reliant on trade to get tools, which are essential for building new buildings. I ran out of tools and didn't yet have the necessary iron works and blacksmith to make my own. So I was stuck. Game breaking. NOTE: This particular bug is fixed already.
Did I mention there are bugs? I built a wall around my village (this is somewhat necessary in order to upgrade housing density), and part of the wall just... didn't get built properly. It said it was under construction, but my builders never paid attention to it and never came to build it. Weird.
Wow the save files are kinda big. What's up with that? Why does my small/medium town produce a ~53 MB save file?