The Lost Village — TheThousandScar Reviews
TheThousandScar reviews FunYoo Games' The Lost Village
I am aboard the weird game train, and The Lost Village is one of those.
From vast open-world sandboxes like Kenshi to the janky sci-fi-fantasy RPG Elex, these obscure and ambitious titles fly to me like moths to a flame, which is excellent! I like games that take risks for better and for worse.
The Lost Village is an odd game that blends city building with fast-paced roguelike combat in the vein of Vampire Survivors. While a relatively prosperous time in Early Access, it was fully released in April this year, and I decided to wait until the full release before delving into the game proper. Big thanks to the developers at FunYoo Games for providing TheStrategyInformer with a review code!
I had my eye on The Lost Village for a while, and I was delighted to get a chance to play it. While it has some significant flaws, it is an enjoyable experience as long as you acknowledge its limitations.
In a fantastical Wuxia open world, the basis of The Lost Village is relatively simple. After a disaster brings your realm to the brink of collapse, your task is to rebuild the almost-destroyed settlement, the bastion of survival. I have played a few of these Wuxia games in recent years, and they all bring some cool things to the table. My favorites are Immortal Life, The Matchless Kungfu, Hero’s Adventure: A Road to Passion, and Amazing Cultivation Simulator. However, The Lost Village takes an entirely different take on those games.
The city-building mechanics are like most games in the genre. You erect buildings, gather resources and recruit new heroes to help your fledgling village along. The tutorial is solid and helpful in teaching players about all the mechanics. The Lost Village has many moving parts, and it always helps to have an interactive tutorial. You can turn it off once you’ve got the basics, but I always recommend following the tutorial, at least initially.
The city building mechanics aren’t particularly deep. You don’t get to micromanage the happy little citizens and check on their stats while developing the village, which is a shame. I love playing god over my towns, though that is more an insight into my god complex than anything else. The Lost Village’s city building is more minimalistic, but there is still a lot to work around, and while basic, it gets the job done.
The Lost Village is a visual masterpiece, with meticulous attention to detail evident in every aspect. The dungeons, in particular, are a sight to behold, and I found myself admiring the scenery as I battled through waves of enemies. While it may not be the most visually stunning roguelike, it certainly ranks among my top five. The game introduces many mechanics and tools; despite the comprehensive tutorials, it can take some time to grasp everything.
The dungeon crawling is the meat of the gameplay, and while there are enough Vampire Survivor clones to fill the Atlantic Ocean by now, it does not prevent The Lost Village from being any less enjoyable. When the village grind and research brought me needing something with a little more violence, there are plenty of locations on the world map to explore and exterminate. The graphics make quite the spectacle on the eyes, and while the combat is typical of the survivor genre we all know now, I had a blast. There are loads of powerups and abilities to kit your warriors, and the creativity shows.
The Lost Village is a pretty interesting game, but some significant issues hold it back. Expect to be overwhelmed by a ton of menus. While the city-building interface is not bad, the lack of UI scaling is a massive problem. The text on the screen is tiny, and when you struggle with headaches and eye strain as I do, it is a significant detriment to my player experience; unfortunately, that made The Lost Village virtually unplayable on the Steam Deck because I could barely read the text! Hopefully, we will get some UI scaling in a future update, although those have been scaled back since The Lost Village left Early Access last year.
This interface problem was an issue on my 1080p screen, but it was workable. The game is almost unplayable on higher-resolution panels, much to my frustration. While it ran more smoothly on my new gaming laptop than on my old machine, the 1440p screen resolution made the text even more challenging to read. The only solution I found was to drop the game’s resolution down to 1366×768, which is hardly ideal in 2025.
Performance is another thing to note. The Lost Village pays a price for looking fantastic and requires a beefy spec to run well. Even on my new RTX 3060 laptop, I ran into frame drops occasionally during the more active battle scenes. While this is only a mid-range setup, it is still more than the recommended system requirements. On weaker machines, you will experience some bad stuttering. Optimization is a central sore spot for the game, which is unfortunate.
The Lost Village certainly has its drawbacks, and at times, it feels like I’m eating a sloppy kebab I bought from a street cart. Eating it properly without making a mess is hard, and I’ll spend an uncomfortable night wondering if it was the right idea to wolf it down so fast. My biggest problems are the poor interface and rough performance, and they make a terrible first impression. The Lost Village has been out for quite a while now, and the developers have been unable to fix these glaring issues.
Despite that, I have been enjoying myself with the game. I wish the town-building mechanics were more in-depth and more like a colony sim, but the dungeon crawling and combat are great fun, and the game does not lack content. If you don’t mind some significant jank and are in the mood for this game, The Lost Village might surprise you.
As a 34 year old British guy, I’ve been gaming almost as long as I’ve been around! Narrative Designer (Spellforce 3, Plarium Games as Lore Editor) and Freelance Writer, my favourite game genres are strategy, RPG, simulation and RTS.
