Havendock is a colony-building game developed by YYZ and published by Different Tales. The game is currently in Early Access on Steam, with a free demo offered as well as an experimental build that can be enabled after purchase. I love cozy indie games and colony-building games, so this game looked right up my alley. While reading about the game I saw comments comparing it to Stardew Valley and Banished (two other games that I love), so I ran off to check out this little shipwreck survivor colony strategy game. I discovered the free demo (that lets you do a LOT), so I downloaded that and dove right in.

Checking Out The Demo

In Havendock, you take on the role of a shipwrecked survivor who must build a new life for themselves on a remote island. Your character starts from scratch on a tiny speck of land in the middle of a large body of water with a few planks of wood from the shipwreck nearby. You build out platforms and structures and encounter a variety of NPCs (vendors and settlers) that join your efforts to build a sustainable colony.

You will need to gather resources, build structures, and manage your population in order to survive. The game features a variety of different challenges and has a tech tree that allows you to unlock equipment, supplies, decor, and items to increase settlers’ happiness. (My favorite is the disco floor!) As you work your way through the technology tree, the NPC vendors bring the opportunity for supplies beyond what floats past you in the water. You build friendships with the vendors by overpaying for goods. (That’s the way to every vendor’s heart.. right?)

The demo let me play for several hours and get probably halfway through the tech tree. It was a nice extended demo that didn’t feel limited in any way until I hit the tech tree demo limit. I found that I had enjoyed the gameplay so much I had no idea how much time had passed. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, but in general, it meant I was really enjoying the game. I decided to go ahead and pick up the full version.

Ability to Save at Any Point

Part of my gameplay experience is the real-life factor of being a Mom, so my game time tends to get broken up into chunks and I have to afk frequently. This game is great in terms of the ability to pause at any point and resume play whenever I have time. The ‘days’ in the game are based on gameplay time, and it has autosave and manual save features. (You don’t have to make it to the end of a game ‘day’ for progress saves.)

Tech Tree & Priority Management

The tech tree covers basics like growing and preparing food all the way into areas like technology and magic.

One tough part for me is that I don’t always remember details of what I was working on last when I step away for a bit. Maybe I was trying to save up the required materials for my next tech tree unlock, or perhaps my settlers were low on a certain ingredient for meals to keep everyone fed and I don’t remember until a bunch of settlers are complaining about hunger. That’s my Mom-life/brain struggle… but since I didn’t enable settler deaths I can recover from those moments.

One helpful feature is the ability to set overall priorities for settlers as well as individual priorities. There is also the option to adjust various game settings to make it easier or more challenging. So far I’ve played pretty much exclusively with the default settings, although once I get a better handle on the flow of the game and the tech tree I might try ramping up the difficulty to see the impacts from that.

Thoughts on Havendock vs Stardew Valley or Banished:

• Stardew Valley: This farming sim generally has a lighter tone than Havendock. Stardew Valley is all about relaxing and enjoying a simple life. Havendock, on the other hand, is more focused on survival. Stardew Valley also focuses on the relationships with all of the villagers, whereas Havendock is focused on developing the settlement and improving technology and resources to improve the survival/lives of the settlers.
• Banished: Banished is a more realistic colony-building game that focuses heavily on resource management. Banished is very unforgiving, and it can be challenging to keep your people alive. Havendock is definitely more forgiving than Banished, and the game is more light-hearted with a simpler art feel. Sustaining and growing your colony is definitely the prominent goal in both games.

Shiny Things:

• A unique setting for a city builder
• Nice depth of colony-building mechanics and tech tree
• Cute graphic style (it might feel simple at first but it grows on you!)
• Adjustable settings to make the game flow differently based on your preferences
• Relaxing soundtrack
• Being able to cycle through

Not So Shiny Things:

• Getting the colony running smoothly without a lot of interaction with the player’s character is difficult
• It feels like there is untapped story potential
• Targeting objects floating under the docks can be tricky once your dock is populated with structures
• Sometimes resource movement/management by the NPCs seems like it could be better (I felt like I had to manually assist with this sometimes)
• The default settings for the pace of the game feel a little fast at times (for me, anyhow!)

Havendock is sweet, cozy, and relaxing. The complexity of balancing the needs of the colony and advancing the tech tree keeps you on your toes. The very chill soundtrack keeps you relaxed even when your character’s hunger and thirst are running low. There could be some improvement in terms of the default pace and AI resource management, but the developer is very involved with the player base and I think we’ll see an even better game down the road. I definitely recommend it to any fans of the colony-builder genre or folks that like cozy games with cute graphics. The game has a unique setting, solid colony-building mechanics, and a technology tree which adds a wider variety of challenges compared to other games in the genre. It’s exciting to be playing the game in Early Access and experiencing the development of the game as it continues to blossom and grow.