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Early access review: Lumberjack’s DynastyWood that I cood
Wood that I cood
Release:Out nowOn:WindowsFrom:SteamFor:£18, $20, €19
The weirdest thing aboutLumberjack’s Dynasty– in a very long list of strange things – are the overheard snippets of conversation as you approach the game’s various NPCs. As you round the crest of a hill you might eavesdrop on a neighbour muttering something about how “everyone is talking about it”. Stroll up the drive of your aunt’s house and she’ll be whispering “yes, it will all be out in the open soon” to your uncle, before they both stop mid-conversation and slowly rotate on the spot like a pair of rotisserie chickens to face you.
Innocuous at first, these throwaway lines of dialogue infuse an otherwise tranquilsimulation gameabout cutting down trees with a kind of chaotic, paranoid energy. The sort that hits you twenty minutes later as you’re chainsawing through a birch and think, what horrible secret are these people hiding? Your auntie looks like the sort who might have mailed talcum powder to her state senator in the 1960s in response to a parking ticket. Your uncle looks like he’s stepped out of a montage of potential suspects in a Netflix documentary about a pair of teenage girls who went missing in the woods - you know, the guy calmly hosing down the back of his pick-up truck at two in the morning.
Potential hitchhiker bodies at the bottom of the lake notwithstanding, the intentions of the NPCs are more straightforwardly exploitative on a day to day basis. You are young blood, fresh from the big city and in search of meaning and purpose up here in the mountains. You are also the only person within a ten miles radius who owns a nail gun, which you will use to repair the dozens of dilapidated homes, barns and prospective murder shacks of your chore-averse neighbours.
Of allthe lumberjack simulators I’ve played, this is the most satisfying depiction of jacking lumber that I’ve found. I’m not being facetious when I say that the buzz of the chainsaw and the strained creak of the falling wood awakens in me some primal urge to wear a check shirt, drink whiskey out of a tin can and crush pine cones between my ass cheeks. That all of this lumberjacking business takes place in a very crudely simulated world, complete with a day-night cycle and a menacing population of badly voiced locals – as if Tim and Eric were put in charge of castingStardew Valley– contextualises the hard work you’re doing in a way that other sims don’t.
On the road map are various planned features, most of which expand on the life simulation side of things, such as the ability to raise animals, or to find a wife who will stay at home cooking meals for you. But for all its laudable ambition to reset gender roles to the 1960s, this wonky early access lumberjack sim is light on features, riddled with bugs and generally unpleasant to play for very long.
It soon becomes obvious that the endless quests to nailgun strangers’ sheds back together aren’t what’s standing between you and the rest of the game, but that theyarethe game. You are not just the town’s new lumberjack, but the town’s prize chump-for-hire. And that, you’ll begin to suspect, is the terrible secret everybody is talking about behind your back.
