Manor Lords review: Steam’s most anticipated game is that authentic

Do you know what dimidiation is? Unless you happen to be a scholar of medieval heraldry, you probably don’t. It’s an older method of combining two or more coats of arms into a single shield to denote a union of, say, two families. In dimidiation, the two coats of arms would be cut down the middle, so you might end up with a shield featuring a griffin’s head stuck to a horse’s rear. Later on, it became more common to simply feature the two coats of arms side by side (a practice known as impalement), which is less confusing and more aesthetically pleasing, but also less funny.

Why do I know all this? Because Manor Lords’ heraldry design tool has a dimidiation check box.

Manor Lords is a medieval city-building and strategy game that just launched in early access on PC. To call it a labor of love is an understatement. It represents years of work by a solo developer, Greg Styczeń, who goes by the moniker Slavic Magic, and its authenticity has struck a chord with Steam players, where it racked up a record 3 million wishlists. It’s an earthy, extremely intricate, and thoroughly researched feudal life sim with a dedication to historical accuracy that borders on the academic — hence the dimidiation inclusion.

Here’s another detail, one that has more to do with the core gameplay. Manor Lords’ basic unit of housing is called a burgage plot. At first, this is just a house with a yard, but once it has been leveled up, the yard can be developed as a sort of small-business venue for the residents, even if they’re employed elsewhere at the farm, the mill, or the storehouse. On this plot, you can set up a chicken coop, a vegetable garden, or a brewery; the residents then take their produce to trade with neighbors at the market. (A marketplace is one of the first requests village residents will make, along with a church.) Healthy market trade generates regional wealth — which you, their lord, can then tax.

The burgage plot illustrates one of the most striking ways Manor Lords differs from the pictures of human society painted by other city-building games. In this world, work is distributed, local transport is slow (very slow), and prosperity is grown from the ground up, rather than generated by efficiently designed systems. It is, in short, a simulation of a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist society. As such, it can be difficult to get your thoroughly post-capitalist, industrialized head around.

In a sense, the game’s title is a misnomer. It’s true that you play a lord, and will eventually build yourself a manor. The game’s marketing has also leaned heavily into its blend of city-building with military strategy; in two of the game’s three scenarios, you’re vying for control of a series of contiguous regions with one or more other lords, and will eventually need to raise a militia to confront them in real-time combat, as well as deal with gangs of bandits. (The third scenario is an entirely combat-free pacifist mode.)

Image: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse

However, it quickly becomes clear that Manor Lords is no grand strategy game. This is partly because, in this early access stage, the game’s clunky military elements and threadbare endgame are less developed than the city building. It also raises a question of where its soul resides. This is a game about conjuring organic, authentic medieval settlements. It’s about labor, agriculture, food, families, and the seasons. It’s about winding roads, wonky thatched roofs, and plodding oxen. It’s about the dense network of needs that builds and sustains a society — and much less about what the lords who survey it all get up to.

With its gorgeous, hazy vistas of fields and woodlands that look like John Constable paintings, Manor Lords also seems more like a bucolic game about peasant life than a game about the political and military machinations of the nobility. (Perhaps Slavic Magic risks accidentally romanticizing the horrors of feudalism in the process, but that’s an argument I’ll have to leave to somebody much more educated than me.) But don’t mistake it for a chill, cozy game. Manor Lords is very, very complex, and the early access version is somewhat lacking in informative tutorial pop-ups and tooltips to guide you through it.

Combined with the foreign nature of the economy you’re building, you’ll encounter a steep learning curve. As you plan your settlement, you’ll need to consider underground water resources and the relative fertility of plots of land for crops like flax or emmer wheat, resources that will then feed into intricate supply chains for food and clothing. You’ll also need to adjust the distribution of your workforce — which draws on families as a worker unit who can accomplish more tasks simultaneously, not individuals — according to the season, assigning them to forage, hunt, farm, or man the charcoal ovens to build up supplies to last the winter.

Image: Slavic Magic/Hooded Horse

It can be overwhelming. Players enticed by the comprehensive fantasy Manor Lords is selling — cultivating crops and building beautiful churches over here, battling rival lords over there — might be shocked at how painfully time-consuming and difficult it is to satisfy all the nested conditions involved in something as simple as buying and raising a few livestock. It’s true that there’s a payoff relative to your effort, since watching a functioning village come to life is enormously satisfying. But Manor Lords is not necessarily a game for players new to the city-building genre.

What genre aficionados and others with the patience to stick around will discover, though, is a unique and incredibly focused game. Slavic Magic has freed itself from genre conventions and built something sophisticated and massively customizable, from its granular difficulty settings to the ease with which the player can create authentic-looking, organic layouts built from irregular plots of land. Manor Lords junks the grid and invites players to inhabit a different time with a different way of thinking. It has a long way to go before its full potential is realized; its deep historical nerdery needs to be much more clearly explained to the player, and there’s a lot of work to do on the military strategy element, the endgame, and the later stages of city building. But it’s already a fascinating portal to another era.