Doloc Town Review: Stardew Valley After the Apocalypse

Every year the farming-sim shelf fills up with games that are pleasant and completely interchangeable. Doloc Town is not one of those. It left early access on 6 August 2026 after fifteen months, and I have put more hours into it in two weeks than into anything else I have played this summer.

What it is

A farm life simulation from RedSaw Games Studio, published by Logoi Games, out on PC via Steam. It first appeared in early access on 8 May 2025 and hit 1.0 this month. It costs 19.99 dollars. Steam Deck compatibility is listed as Playable rather than Verified, which matches my experience - it runs, the text is small. There is no multiplayer; this is a single-player game and it makes no apologies for it.

The hook: it is a side-scroller. You play Proti, a young scavenger dropped into a wasteland after the world ended, tasked with rebuilding the ruined settlement of Doloc, pulling survivors back into it, and eventually finding a place called Eden.

How it actually plays

Losing the third dimension turns out to be the best idea here. Because everything sits on a two-dimensional plane, your farm grows upward: you build platforms, stack plots, run irrigation down a cliff face, and think about vertical space the way Stardew Valley players think about sprinkler grids. It is closer to Terraria's construction logic wearing a farming sim's clothes, and after twenty hours my base looked like a machine I had designed rather than a field I had tidied.

Weather is the antagonist. Extreme conditions roll in and wreck unprotected crops, so half your engineering is really shelter-building, and the long-term goal of pushing the climate back toward something survivable gives the loop a spine that most cosy games do not have. The pixel art is genuinely lovely - all warm ochres and rust against dead sky - and the day-to-day rhythm of scavenging, planting and hauling scrap home is properly moreish.

The highs

Progression that means something. In most farming sims you get richer; here the world visibly gets better, and watching a grey ruin turn green over thirty hours is a payoff no amount of turnip money delivers. The main story runs past thirty hours and completionists are looking at three figures, which for twenty dollars is absurd value.

The lows

The opening is slow and stingy in a way that will lose impatient players before the good systems open up. Menu and inventory handling is fiddly on a 2D plane - you will misclick storage chests more than you should in 2026. NPC writing is functional rather than charming, so the townsfolk never become the reason you keep playing the way Stardew's do. And the mid-game asks for a lot of repeated scrap runs before the automation arrives to fix them.

Verdict

This is exactly the kind of game the big outlets glance at and move on from, and it deserves much better. If you like farming sims but have grown bored of being handed a nice life, this one makes you build one out of rubble. Slow start, superb payoff.

Score: 8/10

Image: Marek Ślusarczyk (Tupungato) Photo portfolio / CC BY 3.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:01_Hungduan_Rice_Terraces_in_Hapao_-_UNESCO_site_Rice_Terraces_of_the_Philippine_Cordilleras.jpg