Lonesome Village is an awesome and relaxing puzzle/life sim. Solve puzzles and help out the villagers by fulfilling their requests. I just couldn’t stop playing this gem. No missable achievements and takes around 15h to complete everything.
Approximate amount of time to 100%: 15h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: I wrote a guide that displays the content of the book and the crafting recipes. You can find it here
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: Yes, at this moment 6 achievements don’t unlock. The developers are working on those and I hope to be able to change this part of the review very soon.
Woah Lonesome Village is such an awesome game! What a great name for this wholesome game, as you start very alone in this village where everybody disappeared, but soon enough you’ll not be so lonely anymore. The game consists of two parts, on one side it is a puzzle game, you climb a tower and each level contains a new room with a puzzle. That each floor contains different types of puzzles makes that even if you encounter a type you don’t like (for me it clearly is that type of puzzle where you have to slide block pieces and there is one empty space) you know it is only for one floor and when past that you’re on your way to more fun games. The other side of this game is a bit more of a life sim game in which you get quests from villagers to make them happy, farming items, crafting items, and buying stuff in shops. The further you get in the tower, the more people will come back to town.
I was blown away by the number of details this game has. Each puzzle room has so many little details and some of the idle sprites of the character are amazing. My favorite idle sprite is the one from the bat with a pot of jam or something like that when he is inside his house. There went a lot of care into this indie gem to make it as awesome as possible.
I have encountered some non-game-breaking bugs in the pre-release Steam version but the developers responded quickly and were wonderful. I trust that the bugs will be fixed as soon as they can. The biggest struggle here was to play Lonesome Village with a controller. Every time I restarted the game Steam/the game didn’t recognize my controller and I had to switch settings in steam from allowing steam input to disable it and then the next time the other way around. Also in-game after it worked sometimes the gamepad bugged out and wouldn’t work as well, but most of the time moving the mouse and then going back to the controller fixed it. I hope they can figure out why the game is sometimes responding so weirdly through gameplay with a controller.
Another bug that exists at the moment I write this is that 6 achievements don’t unlock. All are related to completing the content of the book. I really hope they can fix this retroactively so that those who should have gotten the achievements can get them when they work by just starting up their save file.
Speaking about the achievements, none of them are missable. There are 2 types of achievements, the first type is for progressing through the story and the others are for completing everything in the book you have. This means catching all types of fish, becoming friends with everybody, harvesting every type of flower, and more stuff like that. You should also go back to the tower after completing the story and travel to the top floor.
I had a wonderful time playing through Lonesome Village. It reminds me a lot of Cozy Grove and Garden Story. I love this type of relaxing game where you still feel engaged and love to help out the people in the game. I had a hard time putting this game down to go to bed, I just wanted to keep playing.
This review for Lonesome Village was written on 1 November 2022, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 15 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.