It looks incredibly tranquil and relaxing, with great seasonal  moods! Only just ... a little bit run-of-the-medieval-mill. I played all the Caesar City building games, so got spoiled with Elephants in title number two! Nothing can top that, so my apologies for that bit of criticism. It is totally unfair, since the climate obviously is highly unsuitable for Elephants!

I've been waiting for this game for long, since I saw it first time, yet Steam plays on my feelings - I can't buy it!

Gabe, why you don't want to take my money?

May I ask why its called "banished?" Looks cool... kids too.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/18/banished-review/

any similar experiences?

Thanks for the point-out Island, added to my Steam wishlist.

Looks way better than that prison-building game..

hah..

-tid242

I've been reading many forum posts on this game, and just about everyone is liking this game.  I trust those much more than that review.

Definitely going to pick this up tomorrow.

Semper fidelis! Gabe first, Gabe only!

Yeah, and when you see art games made by bigger studios, asking $80, you play them and just asking "WTF I just paid for?"

Because city is made of people who were banished?

Is it closer to Cities XL where you can't just create a "self-supporting prosperous block" and build them all over the map, and had to think before you do?

And deprive Gabe of his 30% share?! No way!

Seriosly though, I need to replenish funds on my debit card to pay somewhere outside Steam. Same problem with book of Eschalon 3, btw.

Hell yeah. Watch snow coming early in Autumn and destroy your crops before they're harvested, then see your population halved from starvation.

It's not like Cities XL, but you still can't make self-sufficient blocks and repeat them over and over again. 

Like Werewindlefr said, the RPS review is way off.  Yes, the game can be punishing, but once you get your groove going, its really fun.  If I had to guess, the RPS guy had small farms, assuming he had farms at all, or his buildings were spaced out too much, or he had too much stuff in the queue causing issues.

The other big thing the RPS guy mentioned was that there is no alert when someone dies of old age.  Actually, there is, but it is not enabled by default (which is annoying).  Under the Event Log, in the top right corner, there are a number of buttons, the 1st one toggles death by old age alerts.

My current city is 135 people, and I've built almost every building (still missing the Chapel).  I've not run into any bugs, and the only really annoying thing that has happened is that I had a Teacher die without having any Laborers to take over (Laborers will automatically fill a position if someone dies).  That immediately kicked out all students and made them Laborers.  When I assigned a Teacher, none of the Students returned, which means I have a big spike in Laborers, but it'll be a few years before I get any more, as I now have to wait for Students to go through school.  This has the potential of being bad.

Other than that, I've been having a lot of fun with the game.  It can be very relaxing, and it can get a bit hectic at times as well.  I wouldn't really call it a Sim City style game though.  It's more of a resource management/survival game, where your people are your most valuable resource.

One small thing about difficulty: while the "starting resources" settings are labeled "easy/medium/hard", don't let that fool you: this isn't the true difficulty settings. Difficulty comes from the weather settings and map type. "Harsh/Mountain" is extremely challenging. Even "Fair/Valley" is difficult, although more manageable after a dozen hour or two; even in that mode, some mistakes will cost you your town.

Small suggestion: when you start expanding beyond your "downtown" and creating fields which are somewhat remote, build another marketplace with another pack of house/services where you're expanding. That way, your workers won't have to walk for ages to go to work, but will still have access to food from the marketplace. If you don't build those secondary marketplaces, the center one will empty the peripheral barns and people leaving on the periphery will have to go downtown, wasting enormous amounts of time and sometimes dying on the way. This results in much lower food output (when farmers spend too much time on the road, they don't harvest on time and the snow kills the crops) and ultimately will kill almost everyone in town after a failure cascade.

Banished, the first "die and retry" city builder.

I'm still debating about whether or not to get this game. The issue is that I've grown accustomed to buying games on sale, so I rarely pay more than $5 for a game these days. I also have more games than I've played thus far so I'm in no rush to pick up another game. Still, it sounds interesting so I might do some looking into it.

Anno was exactly what I thought when I saw this.