Laysara: Summit Kingdom by Quite OK Games

Laysara: Summit Kingdom is at its core a pretty standard fantasy city-builder.

You plop down buildings and roads – preferably in a growing pattern that manages to be both efficient and pleasing to the eye – and try to keep your citizens happy by balancing their needs (food, drink, shelter) and their wants (a little fun here, a little intoxication or gambling there).

Shangrila-la Land

The obvious major twist is that instead of your usual cartoon Vikings (as in similar games like Land of the Vikings or Valhalla Hills) or discount store Tolkien knock-offs, Laysara’s setting is a fantasy version of the Himalayas.

Don’t expect a historically accurate version of feudal Tibet here – Laysara is a fictional place more akin to Shangri-La or Shambhala than any real place – but the game does an excellent job committing to the aesthetic, from a soundtrack that’s New Age music by way of Ryuchi Sakamoto to the evocative mountain vistas upon which you’ll build your villages.

All of the typical city-builder elements have a Tibetan or Nepali spin, too, from the food, drink, and livestock – tsampa, butter tea, and yaks – to the temple/universities staffed by monks. The latter serve multiple purposes, contributing to citizen happiness by building and maintaining mandalas and prayer sites while also conducting the research necessary for advancing up Laysara’s technology tree.

Tibetan Book of the Debt

Idyllic Tibetan imagery aside, Laysara is definitely still a city-builder, and something of a difficult one. An extended tutorial featuring expressively drawn characters provides an overview of the basic mechanics, but success in the game proper may prove more elusive.

There are multiple buildings and technology branches not covered in the tutorial, and while their functions are easy enough to interpret from context, I had a hard time actually prioritizing them. City planning is fairly hands-on and complex, requiring not only collecting raw materials and turning them into useful products but also setting up delivery and distribution routes.

And despite multiple attempts – and even two full play-throughs of the tutorial – I inevitably hit a point where my cash flow went from positive to negative and fell too quickly for me to reverse the downward spiral.

While the Himalayan fantasy setting provides some opportunities for unique mechanics, like planting trees strategically to stave off winter avalanches, it was the core mechanics that did me in and made it hard for me to stick with Laysara.

The Verdict

I love the aesthetic and concept on display, but much like Goblins of Elderstone – another fairly recent fantasy city-builder that I almost enjoyed – the tranquil presentation belies the game’s fiddly nature and difficulty, which proved to be a bit too much for a casual urban planning enthusiast like me.

More hardcore aficionados of the genre might enjoy this one more, and since Laysara is still in Early Access, I’m hoping that the recent addition of more difficulty options – and maybe some more hand-holding after the tutorial – will be enough to give me another shot at architectural enlightenment above the clouds.

Laysara: Summit Kingdom is available via Steam

Watch the Early Access trailer for Laysara: Summit Kingdom below: