

You start off with a series of dull tasks meant to teach you the controls, but there aren't any in-game instructions. If I didn't have this review compelling me to press on, A Township Tale's tutorial world might have driven me away from the game entirely. Source: Alta (Image credit: Source: Alta) Some will find that tedious, but others will find the hard work more rewarding than just holding down a trigger on a controller. You'll then have to break the tree into portions, then break those into pieces you can use for crafting. You have to swing so your axe goes into the cut or else it will bounce off, and once the tree falls, you can't just collect the materials. Chopping down a tree can get you sweating, especially if you don't have good technique. The major difference with A Township Tale is that you have to do all the work because it's in VR. You can forge weapons via the smelter, go as deep as you can into the mines to find increasingly rare ore, craft goods, or just wander the world while chatting with friends. Like any good survival sim, the game encourages you to explore your world and see what it has to offer without forcing you in a particular direction. In its best moments, A Township Tale reminds me of a sweaty Minecraft LARP.

Just in time, too, because the sun was going down and my arms were tired from my lumberjack routine. I gathered some dead grass, formed a pyre, and struck a flint against a rock to spark it to life. I only realized I needed to cook the spriggull drumsticks I picked up because eating one earlier poisoned me, which made sense in hindsight but the game never explained it to me. I built an axe to chop down firewood so I could cook some spriggull (or dodo) meat before I ran out of stamina. In its best moments, A Township Tale made me flashback to my first hours playing Minecraft. Source: Michael Hicks/ Android Central (Image credit: Source: Michael Hicks/ Android Central)
