‘Dawnfolk’: Light in a bottle

Grade: 4.0/5.0

It’s been a big, as in file size, year for the video game industry. Excessively accoladed works have recently pertained to the big titles from big teams making big money. 2024’s Game Awards were dominated by AAA games — games from formidable publishers with extensive development and marketing budgets — such as “Astro Bot,” “Final Fantasy VII Rebirth” and “Metaphor: ReFantazio” sweeping the industry’s Oscars-equivalent. However, spring semester’s engines are beginning to rev, and the free time mandatory to tend to these big-budget time sucks is beginning to wane. By taking a peek into the more modest market, you may find that Darenn Keller’s “Dawnfolk” is the perfect little world to take bites of between classes. 

In this minimalist resource-management city-builder, darkness has invaded your realm. After rousing the unsuspecting Lueur, your flammable familiar — bearing a striking resemblance to Calcifer from “Howl’s Moving Castle,” and translating to “Glow” in French — take on a bird’s-eye, god-like role in rebuilding your world. Evolving from a shadow-obscured frontier to a well-oiled machine, “Dawnfolk” races you against time to fortify your colony with harvested resources and manpower before the darkness overwhelms.

What certainly won’t overwhelm is “Dawnfolk’s” scale. This sandbox-sized sandbox’s central superpower lies in its containment — its execution is perfectly scaled to its ambition. And though “Dawnfolk” thrives in its simplicity, that doesn’t mean it holds any punches. Don’t let its muted and cozy facade fool you, folks.This game is not free. 

“Dawnfolk’s” campaign opens with a light-handed tutorial before throwing you into the literal dark. From the aforementioned bird’s-eye view, you can manage your resources (Light, Workforce, Food, Materials and later on, the totally quantitative unit of Science) to create a thriving city, capable of fending off any foes the shroud throws your way. Organization is the name of the game here, as adjacency bonuses are provided to particular structural configurations. For instance, a farm will produce no more than scraps of food alone, but erect wheat fields on its cardinal sides, and you’ll quadruple your food output. Alone, this farm example could mislead into underestimating “Dawnfolk’s” complexity, but managing the countless bonuses such as this one is vital to success. Strategic elements such as this curate a game environment that’s easy to harness but tough to master.

Upon leaping into the dark for the first time, “Dawnfolk’s” heart is quick to infiltrate your system; solo developer Darenn Keller curates a chilly yet progressively warming experience. Your minimalist, tiled, grid-like plot begins its life in absolute isolation — nothing but a tent and your ol’ pal Lueur. But as your expansion makes headway, the warmth of the growing colony radiates beyond the screen. Micromanaging individual buildings, in order to upgrade them or further assess their daily production, comes with its own specific sound effects that, coupled with each establishment’s molecular animations, makes your settlement feel alive. Forests buzz and chirp as the trees sway, lumberjack cabins chop and taverns roar with the tipsy banter of your — assuming Maslow’s hierarchy of needs still holds — now thriving citizens. 

Magnifying this ardor, certain tiles mandate manual resource collecting, taking the form of minigames. Take, for instance, deer hunting. Every so often, a forest will spawn a herd of deer. Upon commencing the hunt, the camera zooms in on the specific tile, and the deer undergo their prance for survival within the bounds of the magnified forest. Left, right and shoot keep the game loop detour simple, while adding a third dimension to your survival effort.

Offering a myriad of game modes beyond the campaign, “Dawnfolk” adheres to all play styles. “Puzzle” elevates you to a certain position within a pre-constructed world and challenges you to achieve a goal within a time limit utilizing your gifted resources. “Curious Expeditions”, “Sandbox” and “Endless” round out “Dawnfolk’s” roster, offering many a route to hone your world-building blades. 

Keller has caught light in a bottle. Despite its slim realism’s lack of exposition, “Dawnfolk” remains intimately immersive — upgrading buildings, collecting resources and simply navigating the tiles of your tiny town proves obsessively satisfying. Constantly redirecting your brain to overcome continuously developing obstacles, “Dawnfolk” conjures a gamespace that will keep you engaged time after time.