Paleon

I went in expecting a lightweight time-travel gimmick stapled to a generic city builder. What I found was something closer to a budget-tier RimWorld crossed with Dawn of Man: a top-down, 2D colony sim where task assignment, production chains, and caravan trading carry more weight than the premise suggests. You drop into the Stone Age with a handful of settlers and a long tech tree to climb, and the overarching goal of assembling parts to repair a time machine gives the progression loop a narrative anchor that most settlement sims skip entirely. The production chain side is where Paleon earns its keep. Hunting requires assigning villagers the right tools and priorities before you send them out, otherwise stragglers wander off alone and get ambushed. Crop planting, animal breeding, and warehouse management all feed into a mid-game resource flow that genuinely rewards planning. Trading caravans show up periodically and can paper over supply gaps, though some players find that caravan access in the early game makes resource scarcity too forgiving, which softens the survival tension. Fighting off hostile tribes adds occasional pressure, but conflict is light compared to genre heavyweights, so this leans firmly toward the peaceful builder end of the spectrum rather than a raid-management nightmare. Here is where I have to be honest about the rough edges. The villager AI is the game's biggest liability. Send a group to hunt and only part of them will actually pick up spears and follow through. Pathfinding hiccups lead to villagers standing idle next to tasks they should be completing, and every production job requires manual attention that stops short of true automation. The result is constant babysitting, which can erode the meditative flow that good colony sims build. The UI compounds this: road placement is fiddly, there is no meaningful tutorial, and new players with no colony-sim background will likely bounce off in the first half-hour. No Steam Workshop support means you are also playing the game as the developer ships it, with no community patches or balance mods to fall back on. That said, if you have spent time in Banished or the early builds of RimWorld and can tolerate some jank in exchange for a low price of entry, Paleon has an honest feedback loop underneath the rough surface. The era-spanning tech progression from Stone Age to later periods keeps unlocks coming at a reasonable pace, and the pixel-art presentation has a stripped-back charm that suits a one-person or very small development team. The Steam review pool sits comfortably in the 'Very Positive' range, which tells you that the audience for scrappy, unpolished colony sims is finding enough here to stay engaged. Go in with calibrated expectations: this is an Early Access-spirited project, not a genre-defining release, and the fun-to-frustration ratio depends almost entirely on how much you enjoy manually directing prehistoric workers who occasionally forget how spears work. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Unsupported.

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