Banished

The story begins with exile: a small group of travelers decides to start life over in a foreign land. They have nothing except their clothes and a wagon with supplies from their home.

There is no plot in the usual sense, but there is a chain of events: merchants arrive, some resources are scarce on the map, and the settlement grows or withers.

Banished is a city-building strategy game where you are given a small group of exiles. They arrive in a new land with the clothes on their backs and a wagon loaded with supplies from their former home, and from there everything depends on you. The main feature is that the key resource here is the people themselves. They are born, grow up, work, have children and die. For the town to grow, they need to be fed and their health and mood need to be looked after. Building houses is not enough: you need people who will move in and start new families. Any mistake in the balance, and the settlement quickly withers. The rules of the game are unusual. There are no skill trees, and any building can be put up at any time once the resources are gathered. There is no money either. Surplus goods are traded with the trading ships that come to the town. The merchants are the ones who bring livestock and new annual crops that widen the diet, but their long journey carries a risk: illness may arrive along with the goods. Citizens do twenty kinds of work: from farming, hunting and blacksmithing to mining ore, teaching and healing. There is no universal recipe. On different maps some resources are scarcer. You can replant forests and mine iron and stone, but all of this takes up space where you cannot expand later. The outcome depends on managing risks and stockpiles. The game is for one player, has a Metacritic score of 73 and was released in 2014. There is no Russian language, only English. It suits those who enjoy growing a settlement slowly and checking every step.