Karawan

Karawan (2021) is a meditative puzzle game where you journey to escape a desolate, crumbling world. It requires significant route-planning strategy, as you work to find optimum path to gather resources without running out of food. The novelty is extended by these choices interplaying with morally ambiguous consequences for the other characters in the game.

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You start alone with limited resources in a vast, desolate world that's crumbling around you. You navigate through the world, depicted as hexagon tiles, to get to the far away portal. However, you can't make it alone so must recruit the help of villages who can join your caravan and harvest resources from adjacent tiles. However, these villagers also consume food, which means you need to make difficult choices about who to join with and who to plunder for resources and leave behind.

You need to pick the optimum route that allows your farmers, miners and lumberjacks to collect as many resources as they can. This needs to be balanced with the resources required to flatten land and build bridges. You can unlock powerful spells that allow you to slow time, plant food and switch tiles as you move through the three different worlds available.

It's a unique game that offers a blend of puzzle game with strategic resource management and progression, all while offering a philosophical experience that allows you to reflect on your actions, and offers meaningful and impactful choices where the answer is often not as black or white as it seems.

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Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Karawan 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated a year ago.