// PC GAMER — GAMING
I've been waiting 20 years for a worthy sequel to my favourite life sim, but THQ Nordic has other ideas
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I usually expect blank stares when I wax nostalgic about The Guild 2, a rough diamond that's part management game, part life sim, part RPG. It's the kind of game that does well in central Europe but not remotely as well elsewhere. Your classic eurojank romp: big on ambition, not so much on optimisation or clarity. This is the Stalker of life sims.
For the uninitiated, imagine Anno—or any other detailed economic sim—but instead of playing some omnipresent administrator, you're just some guy. Some guy, though, who can climb the ranks of medieval society, forging a lasting dynasty with the power to change history. Or you could just open a successful tavern or become nothing more than a moderately successful gravedigger.
So many life sims fall into the cosy game category, and while I like Animal Crossing and Pokopia, it's sometimes hard to shake the feeling that these games aren't for me—a middle-aged man who loves boring things like historical accounts of terrible monarchs or the rise of the industrial revolution. I was not yet a middle-aged man when The Guild 2 came out in 2006, but I was still a bore, and this game felt made for me.
I craved more, and the monkey paw curled. In 2017, The Guild 3 was released in early access. It largely seemed to be more of the same thing, but fancier. I was thrilled, right up until after I had to play it. Back then I ran Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Premature Evaluation column, exploring new early access games. Here's what I wrote at the time:
Disappointment has hounded me at every turn. Nothing I do feels like it matters, and the simulation that ostensibly drives the game is very, very slight. Relationships, jobs, the economy that’s meant to lie at the heart of the game—all of them are half-baked at best, and I’ve seen little evidence of any dynamism.
Things didn't improve much throughout early access. The release date kept getting pushed back, promised features never materialised, and the initial developer, GolemLabs, was given the boot, to be replaced by Purple Lamp. The Guild 3 eventually left early access in 2022. But it never actually got finished. Updates continued for a year, but not ones that could salvage it.
But now a new Guild is on the horizon! Except it's not really new. It's The Guild: Europa 1410, inspired by the first game in the series. Unfortunately, this was before it became a life sim/RPG. This is disappointing, but I still love economic sims, so I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
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The Guild: Europa 1410 is, in its current incarnation, just a bunch of flavourless menus and repetitive notifications. It's a little bit less abstract than a lot of economic sims, in that you are technically playing a person, as well as the head of a dynasty, and they technically exist within the world. However, you exclusively control them through menus, and how they interact with the world is extremely limited. You also can't name them, any of their family members, or their business. The game does that for you. And while you do have RPG-like stats, there's no character creation.