Virtual Villagers is a real-time, idle life sim, god game and puzzle series developed and published by Last Day of Work, or LDW Software, primarily from 2006 to 2010 spanning from the award winning first game to the most recent 2017-2024 releases of Virtual Villagers: Origins 2 and Virtual Villagers 6: Divine Destiny, as to why I’m not including those two in discussion I’ll get to later.
The PC versions of the first five games are Freeware, and can be downloaded from the publisher's website. I'd give them a solid reccomend if you're in the market for an interactive puzzle game.
I got into the series around the time when my family finally got internet around 2011-2012, one of my siblings (allegedly) became very interested in pirating software, including Command & Conquer titles, TES: Oblivion, Photoshop CS6, Pokémon ROMs which they didn’t know how to use, and of course, Virtual Villagers, because while they’re free now, they certainly weren’t when they were being released less than a year prior.
Being 2011, I had access to the third, fourth and fifth entries because I don’t think my sibling was super interested in the older ones so they either didn’t Acquire them or I just didn’t see them, and those are primarily where my experience lies, The Secret City and The Tree of Life are my favorites because not only are they the, in my opinion, the best looking and most balanced of the series but they’re also the ones I obsessed over when I was younger.
And I also obsessed over spamming food into my save files with Cheat Engine because while I love these games, oh my god are they slow and I was tired of my guys starving because I couldn’t grasp the concept of the Beehive and forgetting to pause my game.
Many of the assets on this shrine are native textures from the games! This series has impacted me on more levels than just being a piece of entertainment, the artwork, inspirations and music are still on my mind to this day... if you couldn't already tell.