Patron Gameplay Preview – Chill Management Sim

Patron is a relaxing management sim where you are tasked with leading a very small colony and turning it into a prosperous city.

Patron will be familiar territory for those who have played management sims before. As in most management sims, you do not take direct control over the people living in the colony. You simply set tasks and policies to manage your citizens and take a more hands off approach.

The only three requirements for your citizens to survive are food, housing, and a source of fuel for warmth during the winter. Making sure you have a constant source of food is very important as during the winter period it will be more difficult to acquire food. You can build structures such as the fisherman’s hut and gatherer’s shelter to assign people to those jobs and start producing food for your village.

Each building has upgrades as well. Those upgrades usually cost gold and a resource. The more advanced buildings and upgrades require more advanced materials such as stone and iron. These upgrades usually increase production yields and decrease overhead. Since your gold income is limited, you have to prioritize certain buildings over others.

There’s also an upgrade tree that unlocks new buildings and bonuses. These take some time and are costly as well so choosing when to upgrade is important as upgrading too much too quickly can leave you in a precarious situation where you no longer have gold to build and upgrade other things.

Overall, Patron is a pretty relaxing management sim. There’s really no source of threat other than citizens dying from mismanagement. There are no hard decisions you have to make where many lives could be potentially lost as in Frostpunk. It’s just a chill time making sure your village prospers, and that is A-OK by me. Not every game has to have stressful life or death decisions and game ending scenarios. Sometimes I just want to run a happy little village.