In this new medieval city builder that launched on Steam today, build a sprawling town with the help of companions who level up and train their own apprentices

There’s a familiar start to City Tales: Medieval Era, a new city builder that launched on Steam today. You’ve got a few citizens that need housing and food and work, so you place a wood cutter’s camp near the trees, a gathering station near a berry patch, and a hunter’s cabin in the woods: stuff any city builder player has done plenty of times before.

But there are also some interesting twists on the city building formula. You don’t build homes for your citizens, you draw districts. Click on the map to create borders around the district, and your citizens will handle the rest: dividing up the district into plots and deciding where their houses go themselves. You can add other buildings to a district: a well, a market, a weaver’s shop, a lumber mill, but again, you don’t choose their precise location. Your wee little villagers handle that.

I like that approach. There’s something to be said for city builders where you’re 100% in charge and decide where every last structure is placed, but I also enjoy giving my citizens a bit of agency. It also tends to make a city feel like it’s growing organically.

Something else fun in City Tales: Medieval Era is the six named companions (you can choose their names if you wish) that you begin the game with. When you build a production quarry like a sawmill or a rock quarry, you assign one of these companions to run it. While they work and generate resources, they’ll level up, getting better at their jobs.

If you’re thinking, “Wait, I’m going to have way more than six production buildings, won’t I run out of available companions?” Don’t worry, because your companions are awesome. While they’re working and leveling up, they’re also training apprentices to take over for them. Once an apprentice is ready, you can assign your companion to another building, or keep them where they are to continue leveling up that skill until they’re a specialist.

Companions will even request certain jobs, from time to time. Judith, who I had working away making planks in my lumber mill, approached me to ask if she could work on the cattle farm I was planning to build. She’d prefer if it were a sheep farm, which made sense—Judith’s bio mentioned that she had a loyal sheep dog—but at the very least it sounded like she was more interested in farming than churning out planks all day.

This is a really nice touch: instead of parking randomized faceless NPCs into production buildings and forgetting about them for the rest of the game, it feels more like you have real people working to make your town successful, improving their skills, training other citizens, and even asking you for a choice of the jobs they do.

I’m not too far along in my own town yet, but I’m enjoying the organic approach to building and seeing my little companions grow their skills in City Tales: Medieval Era. It launched into early access on Steam today and is 10% off for the next two weeks.