Towerfolk: six euros for a medieval town where the danger mostly comes from inside

Most medieval city builders give you an external enemy and ask you to build a wall.

Towerfolk does that, then adds a line I had not seen: your threats are not only from outside, danger lurks within as well.

And it spells it out: keep thieves in check, prevent quarrels among your soldiers, and protect your people from hunger.

What is in the box

The full release landed this morning, at 6.47 euros.

Defence. You train soldiers, build towers, strengthen walls. Bandit raids can happen at any time, which means you can never dismantle your garrison to gain three labourers.

Construction. You expand your lands, gather stone, wood and iron, set up production sites, and aim for the status of a thriving trade hub.

Governance. This is the part that interests me. It is not only about raising structures: you have to provide food, housing, health and security, while fulfilling royal demands to maintain order.

Royal demands are a good idea in a game at this price. They create pressure that comes neither from the economy nor from the enemy, but from an authority you answer to. That is the difference between being a mayor and being a vassal.

The threat from within

This is what gives the game its small personality, and it deserves a pause.

Thieves, first. A prosperous town mechanically produces people who take what is not theirs, and having to police them turns wealth into a problem rather than a score.

Quarrels among soldiers, second. That one is unusual. You train a garrison to defend yourself, and that garrison becomes something to manage in its own right. Armed men who are bored are a risk, and few games in the genre dare model it.

And hunger, finally, which is the genre staple but takes on another meaning listed beside the other two: a starving population is not only a population that dies, it is a population that steals and fights.

The three internal threats answer each other, and that is more coherent than you expect at this price.

The real problem, and it is brutal

Eight players online at the time of writing.

Twenty-one positive reviews out of twenty-eight, which is fine, but on a tiny sample.

That is not a judgement on the game's quality, it is an observation about its visibility. Towerfolk launches the same day as six other titles, one published by MicroProse and one by the Palworld house, in a genre where the heavyweights number in the dozens.

For you as a buyer, that means two concrete things. There will be no community producing guides, mods or answers to your questions. And the patch cadence will depend entirely on the studio's persistence, not on public pressure.

That is the fate of a lot of honest small games, and it is a shame.

The other reservations

The presentation will not stop you in the street. It is clean and legible, that is all, and in a genre where you stare at your town for hours, a lack of visual character has a cost.

The depth is unknown. The store page describes systems, not their grain. Knowing there is food, housing, health and security does not tell you whether those four genuinely trade off against each other or are four bars to keep green.

And there is an AI disclosure, which I mention because that is the rule and because it is honest and narrow: the studio states that only the loading screen drawings were generated. It is the most limited disclosure I have read in a while, and it has the merit of being precise.

At six euros and change, this is the kind of purchase you do not regret even if it only holds for ten hours. There is a real idea in it, that of a town endangering itself as it succeeds, and it deserves better than eight players.

If you are looking for your next medieval city builder and the big names have worn you out, this one at least has the merit of not believing the threat is always outside.

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