Virtual Villagers 3: The Secret City is the third installment to the award-winning game series. For those new to Virtual Villagers, the game is a village simulator, where apart from caring and guiding the people of the tribe, you’ll also have to discover and solve puzzles to advance through the game’s narrative. As with many of Last Day of Work’s games, Virtual Villagers features a real-time simulation aspect. The game time passes even when you’re not playing it. This means that when you start your game since the last time you played it, you could find your villagers grown up, with new skills or even dead (if you didn’t care for them well).

This chapter of the game involves the exploration of yet another part of Isola. This time, the map will be over an ancient city lying in ruins. Personally, this choice of setting makes The Secret City brings a whole new level of excitement and interest to the game. There’s a strong atmosphere of mysteriousness to accompany the need for discovery this time round, and you’ll be giving in to your curiosity quite often.

The way the game works is very similar to the earlier Virtual Villagers games, where you have to train your villagers in doing various tasks and bring them towards various items on the map to experiment with. There are also changes to the technologies tree to accommodate the new puzzles, and two new areas of research: nature and magic. We’re talking fancy magical potions this time. On top of that, a weather system has been introduced. Not only does this help create the game environment, but it also becomes a factor in some puzzles you’ll be needing to solve.

Sequels often run the risk of deviating too far from originals when the developers decide to pack in too many of the wrong features, which in turn damages the best parts of the game people used to like. Virtual Villagers is spared from that. You can trust Last Day of Work to preserve the mechanics in the game which are soundly proven, and to expand on what the players have been hungering the most for — a new land to play around in, new puzzles to solve, and a new story that won’t disappoint.

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• Making a Chief is easy but you may not want one right away
• When it rains, mushrooms flourish
• Making babies is not the only way to improve parenting skill
• Working on projects is not the only way to improve restoration skill
• Healing villagers is not the only way to improve healing skill
• If you are stuck, try things again after you have bought more tech
• If you grow your tribe too soon, you may not have the food resources to sustain them yet.
• If your healer gets sick, who is healing your tribe?
• Make sure you always have a child or you will miss out on collectibles and mushrooms
• The Chief gains special abilities with each new level of Leadership Tech. When you start the game he/she can already help to feed your tribe.
• Repeat collectibles can give a big tech bonus. Your children can contribute to both food and tech in this way.
• Children can help the tribe in many ways!

• Solve the bee hive puzzle and plant the piece of fruit that is on the ground near the broken lift.
• Assign 1 farmer to the bee hive, 2 builders to either the hut or the leaf-covered roster in the cemetery, and 1 scientist to the lab to research.
• Once you have 2 adept builders, assign your builders to the lab, and your scientist to the building project until you have a total of 3 adept builders.
• Once you have 3 adept builders, assign all available people to the lab until you can afford Restoration Tech level 2.
• After you buy Restoration Tech level 2, use your 3 adept builders to repair the lift.
• Plant any fallen fruit you recover until you have 3 trees. At this point you can allocate people to the lab, building projects, healing, or anything as you see fit.
• You should have 2 farmers, maybe 3, and do not exceed a population of 15 until you have a better food resource than the trees.
• When it rains, mushrooms grow much more frequently.
• Your chief can help out with food by using his chief powers. He can also increase the amount of fruit gathered from the orchard!

(14 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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