There's a special feeling that occurs when a game indicates that it knows what its players are going to want to do, and seems to gently guide you to play it just right. In the city-builder Banished , that moment occurred for me almost as soon as I loaded the tutorial, which is one of the best I've ever played. In both how it presented itself and how it taught me, Banished clearly indicated that it wanted me access and comprehend its systems. And then... then it let me encounter my first harsh winter where a third of my town died to starvation. First Banished teaches its systems, then it crushes you with them.

Banished uses a clean, minimalist, and customizable interface where by default, 95% of what appears on the screen is the city itself. You can (and probably should) add information windows and a mini-map, but even with that it's a far cry from other series like SimCity or Tropico whose interfaces and pop-ups can dominate the screen. The lack of external interruption makes it easy to turn on Banished and lose several hours to the passing of the seasons. A late autumn snow threatens the harvest.

Its difficulty doesn't come from struggling to figure out what's happening or how to understand it, nor from arbitrary events like time limits or invasions (although there are a few random disasters like fires and disease), but instead from the rhythms of play—expanding too quickly to feed everyone, or running short of firewood in winter. It's difficult to overstate how refreshing it is to play a city-building strategy game whose challenge is natural, instead of imposed artificially.

Chickens cross a stream on their own to get to a new pasture.

Unfortunately, Banished’s reliance on intrinsic difficulty means that it can veer wildly between too difficult or too simple based on either player expertise or the random setup of each map. While most of my half-dozen cities were properly tough, the last new village I started proved ridiculously easy--and without its difficulty, Banished loses much of its drive.But let's focus on the moment-to-moment gameplay, and what makes it so worthwhile. First, Banished is simply pleasant to watch and listen to. It's set in a pre-industrial Europe-style world, but the graphics, architectural style, and constant, impressive weather effects make me think of it as nothing less than SkyrimCity. And oh, that weather—if you're a fan, as I am, of seeing and hearing snow and rain in video games, then the snows and rains of Banished are entrancing. I'm not sure I've ever played a strategy game with such a good visual feel for the turning of the seasons (except perhaps Total War: Shogun 2). Meanwhile, the sound and music are either unobtrusive or charming; I particularly like the little “tink tink tink” sound that laborers make when gathering stone and iron.Second, Banished's moment-to-moment gameplay managed to stay consistently interesting due to never reaching a point of equilibrium where I felt comfortable with where my town was at that moment. There was always something on the verge of collapse. It does this in a few ways. Population-wise, unlike any city-builder I've played, immigration is not the chief method of expansion. You can only grow by having children, which occurs when you build new houses so young families have space. But kids are useless—they eat, but they don't work. Too many kids leads to too little food and famine. But if you build too few new houses, your population ages and shrinks. It’s a constant balancing act.