Hearth and Hamlet game review

If you’ve come to this Hearth and Hamlet game review wondering whether building and controlling your own tiny medieval village is as satisfying as it sounds, the answer is yes, this is essentially Medieval SimCity. And if you’re anything like me, you may have a slight god complex when playing video games.

Because the more control a game gives me over its people and the world around them, the happier I am.

It’s why all of my Sims end up with the same bathroom despite the fact that they’re supposedly independent people with their own tastes and personalities. I have optimised bathroom construction in small spaces. I also only like ONE wall tile, ONE floor tile, and ONE ceiling light. Why would I deliberately give them a less efficient bathroom just because they might prefer it?

I am a one-person HOA that decides all exteriors, interiors and furniture.

So, a cosy little game where I get to break away from a corrupt lord, establish my own medieval village, manage its resources and gradually build it into a thriving settlement?

Yes. Obviously, I was going to play this.

I finished Hearth and Hamlet in 10 hours, which may have involved falling face-first into an ADHD hyperfocus hole because I realised fairly early on that I could probably finish the whole thing in one day.

And while there were definitely things I wanted Hearth and Hamlet to do differently, it delivered exactly the kind of low-stakes strategy and resource-management brain candy I was looking for.

If you’re interested in other cosy games I have reviewed, please click here for the Gaming reviews section on my blog.

Hearth and Hamlet game review

Title: Hearth and Hamlet
Developer: Phorust Studios
Publisher: Runic Forge, Gamersky Games
Release date: 20 August 2026
Players: 1 (single player only)
Platforms: Windows, Linux
Genre: Strategy, Management, Cosy
Click to buy on Steam (this is not an affiliate link)

Hearth and Hamlet

Start with a campfire. Build a kingdom. Hearth and Hamlet is a medieval citybuilder clicker that blends resource management, in-depth upgrade trees and relaxing idle gameplay. Build your empire by researching new technologies, passing new laws, trading with far-off lands, and more.

– Steam

Medieval SimCity, but make it cosy

The basic premise of Hearth and Hamlet is that you’ve broken away from a corrupt lord to establish a settlement of your own. From there, your tiny collection of buildings and villagers gradually expands into something approaching a city. Or at least the ye olden days equivalent of one.

But you aren’t simply trying to make the population number go up.

You need enough resources to keep everything functioning, enough food to keep everyone fed, workers assigned where they’re needed, and the right infrastructure in place to support whatever you want to do next.

And this was my favourite part of the game.

There are multiple goals competing for your attention, so progressing isn’t simply a matter of completing whatever quest happens to be sitting in front of you. You need to think about whether your village can actually support that next step.

Can I afford to build this yet? Do I have enough people? If I assign workers here, what am I taking them away from? If the population grows, do I have enough food to feed everyone?

None of it becomes particularly stressful, but there is enough resource and inventory management involved that I couldn’t completely switch my brain off either.

That’s the sweet spot for me with this sort of cosy strategy game. I want to potter around making things better, but I also want my decisions to matter.

And I want absolute control over the lives of my tiny digital citizens.

Which brings us to my problem.

Please let me control my own village

For a game about establishing your own village after escaping someone else’s control, Hearth and Hamlet is surprisingly reluctant to let you decide where anything goes.

Buildings have designated locations.

For some of them, that makes complete sense. A quarry obviously needs to be where the stone is. I’m not going to argue with geology.

But why can’t I decide where the residents live? Why can’t I choose where the tavern goes? Or the blacksmith? Or where the chief gets to build their house?

This is my village. Give me my tiny medieval urban-planning powers.

It means that although the settlement gets bigger as you progress, I never really felt like I was designing it. New things opened up, but the village itself didn’t meaningfully become an expression of the choices I’d made. The digital town planner apparently already knew we’d eventually need space for the magic school next to the blacksmith, so I wasn’t allowed to put anything there myself.

There are also quite a few features locked behind population requirements or particular quests. That’s completely normal videogame progression, and ordinarily I wouldn’t have much of an issue with it. But Hearth and Hamlet is a small game. When the entire experience only takes around 10 hours, having to wait for permission to access things can make the restrictions feel much more noticeable.

And then there is the lord.

The corrupt lord. The lord my digital citizens specifically ran away from.

Eventually, he discovers your lovely new village and demands that you pay him taxes.

Excuse me?

I have an army. I had been deliberately building an army.

And yet the game would not give me the option to tell this man precisely where he could put his request for taxes. It made me pay them in order to advance the game. I was Not Happy™ about it.

I understand that refusing him is part of the eventual progression of the story. But from a roleplaying perspective, my chief was ready to throw hands considerably earlier than Hearth and Hamlet allowed.

Cosy brain candy with a satisfying ending

Fortunately, you do eventually get to tell the lord where to go.

And yes, that does make the ending satisfying.

Not because there was some enormous emotional payoff or profound revelation, but because after spending the game building a village specifically to get away from this man, I could finally say, in essence: Up yours. I’m not paying your stupid taxes anymore.

Worth it.

Hearth and Hamlet is also a game I’d comfortably call cosy, rather than one that merely looks cosy.

You can build an army, but there isn’t really combat in the traditional sense. The challenge comes from managing your settlement: balancing resources, planning your next move and making sure you’ve got what you need to continue growing.

That said, while your tiny digital citizens farm, fish and mine, you don’t do any of those things yourself. If that’s the part of a cosy game you enjoy most, this might not be for you.

However, if you enjoy strategy games, inventory and resource management, and watching numbers gradually move in the correct direction because of your excellent administrative decisions, there’s a lot here to enjoy.

If what you love most about city builders is designing the settlement itself, though, you may find it limiting. I certainly did. I wanted more freedom to make the village mine, rather than simply unlocking the developers’ predetermined village one piece at a time.

There’s also something satisfying about knowing you can actually finish Hearth and Hamlet. In a genre where games can easily swallow hundreds of hours (some of which don’t have an ending), this is a complete little experience you can tumble into for a weekend and come out the other side.

Heath and Hamlet is fun and cosy. It occupied my brain very successfully for 10 hours and gave me the satisfying conclusion I wanted.

But it’s brain candy.

And I don’t mean that dismissively. Sometimes I actively want brain candy. Not every game needs to emotionally destroy me the way Spiritfarer did. Sometimes I just want to manage grain supplies, optimise my workforce and overthrow a corrupt medieval lord.

Preferably while being allowed to choose where the tavern goes.

Have you played Hearth and Hamlet?