20 Beloved Video Games That Have Aged Terribly

Banished is a survival city-builder about maintaining your own small colony on the outskirts of civilization. The game made its debut back in 2014, quickly gaining popularity within the city-builder community thanks to its harsh but fair difficulty and intuitive economy.

The game was fun to play, even if most of the time your people were starving or freezing to death. The difficulty of it was part of its appeal, and for a while no other game could come close to Banished in this regard.

However, it has been twelve years since Banished's release (even if it feels like yesterday), and there have been many competitors in the survival city-builder genre. A lot of these titles have borrowed from Banished, like the recently published Manor Lords, for example, and each made its own contribution to improving upon the game’s base mechanics.

With so many different options and upgrades over the years, when you come back to Banished in 2026, the game feels incredibly basic.

It can still be a lot of fun, but if you’ve been following the city-builder scene over the years, Banished probably won’t be able to capture your attention for more than a couple of hours.