If you see Craftlings and think “Oh cool! It’s a bit like Lemmings!” then Ariano Games’ work is halfway done. At first glance, this really does look a lot like Lemmings without the bright green hair, but it shouldn’t take long to see that this is a very different style of strategy game.
The Craftlings are, similar to the Lemmings that inspired them, about as hapless as they come. They’ll just wander straight forward, only turning around if they encounter a wall they can’t clamber up, or something that clearly tells them to go back the other way. If there’s nothing to stop them, they’ll more than happily march off a cliff or high-up ledge and plummet to their doom… and then another Craftling spawns in.
It’s up to you to guide them, keep them safe and busy, and channel their tireless efforts in a productive direction toward the objective. Instead of just reaching a simple exit portal, you task them with constructing buildings, growing and evolving a village as you look to meet the demands of the level. In the first stage, that’s to build a ballista to fire at a giant octopus that’s clearly one very bad dude.
Building takes resources, and gathering resources requires tools, meaning you need to build up a little supply chain to get things done. You don’t just buy a pickaxe and give it to a Craftling, but instead have to build the Mining Shed that makes them in exchange for wood and coins, a Craftling then automatically grabbing a pickaxe once created and marching straight ahead until they find some rock to smash, before dragging the rock back to town and dropping it wherever it’s needed.
There’s no real thought behind this from the Craftlings, so it’s up to you to create the paths and marshal their efforts. Place ladders if they need to go between different levels, place blockers to just turn them back around – thankfully, you don’t need to sacrifice a Craftling for this most menial of jobs – and conditional arrows that can allow and prohibit certain Craftlings with certain items in hand. In fact, everything’s conditional. Click on the blocker and it’s disabled for a bit; click on the arrow boards and you can change their rules; click on a Craftling and they’ll hop and head back the other way.
It’s a rather satisfying twist on the classic style, but Craftlings promises to go much further. There’s further nuances, like heavy objects needing you to place mechanical lifts to raise and lower them between levels, as they can’t be dragged up and down ladders. Latter levels also introduce combat, which naturally requires you to build a barracks, to equip and train Craftlings to be able to defeat skeleton enemies.
That was one of the main new challenges in the third level that we briefly tried – a new stage that goes beyond the two levels currently found in the public demo. Alas, with time running out and my Craftlings unable to defeat the skeletal menace standing between them and some bricks I needed, I had to get rather creative.
While you need the Craftlings to do a lot of the work, you do still have a good amount of arbitrary god-like control in this strategy game. You place key structures like the material lift, you have magic bubbles and tricks to send a single Craftling up and down between levels, and you also have dynamite to just destroy certain obstacles and items in the world, depositing many items back in your inventory.
And with a mean skeleton in my way, that got me thinking. Could I just delete the ground beneath it? No, Ariano Games has thought of that, but could I tunnel beneath him? And then build out a platform beyond him with a ladder up to where the bricks were? Using blockers and timely clicks to bounce the Craftlings away from danger and back towards town?
Well actually…. yes!
Look, I’m not too proud about breaking the puzzle design – OK, I’m quite proud about it – but it does show that there’s some creative freedom with how you can tackle certain tasks, and that’s part of the magic of sandbox titles and the 90s games that were the source of inspiration for Craftlings. Finding your own path and your own solution is always much more fun than just following the main designed path.
If that’s tickled the nostalgic part of your brain, then make sure to check out Craftlings for yourself. There’s no announced release date, but there is a demo available on Steam with two levels from the game, and you can obviously wishlist it to keep tabs on its progress.