Doloc Town Review — Making the Most of the Wasteland

If you could rebuild the world, would you? Or is making the choice to survive strength enough?

Doloc Town asks these questions, though not so directly, as it tasks you with farming, ranching, and surviving as part of a small post-apocalyptic community. As a little girl who has lost her parents, you’ll find comfort in a new community as you toil the soil and build massive planters, learning along the way that the wasteland doesn’t have to be all waste.

The first aspect of Doloc Town that is sure to stand out to you is the game’s style. Pixel art meets a soft anime-inspired “moe” look, defined by huge eyes, bright colors, and artistic choices that can only be described as adorable. I don’t use that word lightly, either: Doloc Town is incredibly cute, despite its occasional foray into some depressing subject matter befitting of the setting. As many times as I found myself sad about the main character’s missing parents, I also found myself certain that I would go into diabetic shock watching her little hat and sleeves bounce up and down with every step.

The cuteness is in juxtaposition with the game’s post-apocalyptic setting, but it doesn’t clash with it. In fact, the game’s cute nature and its dark setting are stronger because of each other. The game’s particular art style, combined with the post-apocalyptic setting, reminded me a lot of the anime and manga Girls’ Last Tour, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Doloc Town took inspiration from it.

While the artwork does a lot to set the game apart from others in the genre, the setting certainly helps. It is the first cozy farming sim of its kind that I can think of that takes place in an apocalyptic wasteland. The towering, ruined skyscrapers in the foreground create a beautiful backdrop as you grow crops in little cardboard boxes and farm scrap from piles of junk. The setting truly adds a unique quality to the experience, which isn’t something you can say about every title in the genre.

In my opinion, the game starts pretty slow. You don’t have access to many crafting materials or recipes, and to get more, you need to complete quests while also navigating the schedules of the quest givers, who simply won’t be available if you don’t reach them in time. If we compare the game to Stardew Valley, which is perhaps the most recognizable game in the genre, I’d say that Doloc Town takes a significant bit longer before your farming operation really starts opening up.

Once the game opens up, though, oh boy does it open up.

Doloc Town is played on a side-scrolling 2D plane. Normally, this might be bad for a game like this, but the ability to build platforms upward makes space a non-issue. If you’ve played Terraria or Starbound, it’s essentially the same concept, but you don’t have to worry about your platforms blocking your grow boxes from rain or sunlight. You can also place plants in front of buildings, so long as you’re not blocking the tile for the door.

This ability to build upward means you have, essentially, the largest buildable space I have seen in a farming sim of this kind, and you’ll really need all of that space as you begin to fill every skyward acre with barns, storage containers, smelting equipment, massive greenhouses, and more. Though the game eventually starts to provide you with options for automation, I will say that it can become a bit overwhelming at times to manage, with an ever-present feeling of “so much to do, so little time to do it” once your farming platform starts to really grow.

Environmental hazards like acid rain add yet another chore, forcing you to go to every exposed, non-adapted plant and cover it in plastic mulch. This level of involvement will be fun for some and frustrating for others. It really comes down to what you consider tedious and what you consider a feature.

If I had one real complaint about Doloc Town, it’s that the game doesn’t do a very good job of communicating vitally important information to you. The worst case of this lack of communication comes midway through the game, when you suddenly discover that, to progress, you were supposed to have been collecting and working toward a key item with a ton of quests behind it. What should have been a task that you completed gradually leading up to this point becomes a sudden roadblock that will take you close to the equivalent of your current playtime to complete, and it blocks any further progression until you do.

I read through the game’s Steam reviews to make sure I wasn’t the only one who faced this problem, and I found a rather clever way to explain it in several different posts. It’s like not finding out about the Community Center in Stardew Valley until a few years into the game, with all its vital unlocks waiting for you to wander in that whole time.

Despite this problem, and despite what I would call the game’s slower progression, I still think Doloc Town is an excellent and unique entry in its genre, giving players a much-needed change of pace in a genre otherwise full of samey releases. If you’re a farming sim fan, or even if you just like the game’s aesthetic, I recommend picking up Doloc Town and taking your own shot at making the most of a wasteland.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Doloc Town. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Doloc Town is available on Steam.