Lakeburg Legacies wants to fit right into the ‘cozy’ genre of games with a combination of dating simulation and city building against a rustic Medieval backdrop. Its delightful and charismatic trailer drew me in immediately. I couldn’t wait to pour myself a mocha, cover up in blankets and cardigans, and settle in for the hours these town management sims tend to require. But despite the existence of a few good ideas, it doesn’t succeed in doing either genre particularly well.

Starting off with a single villager, your job as Lakeburg’s matchmaker is to create a bustling town by making happy marriages. It’s a romantic pitch, but since you’re also in charge of the town’s workforce, you also need to think about resource gathering and expanding your industry. On top of that, there are various social aspects to keep track of, as the relationships villagers can form with each other will affect their morale, productivity, and love lives. This is a pretty novel idea, and there are some aspects of it that do work well with the town building mechanics.

When a villager needs a match, you can send them to the matchmaker and choose their new spouse. Each potential spouse appears to be randomly generated each time, and the art style does an impressive job of making each one look natural rather than a hodge-podge of different features. They also come with a wide range of skills, hobbies, and personality traits, not all of which will be positive. You’ll need to weigh these positives and negatives against each other to decide whether or not to bring them into the fold. You can set your villagers up with anyone regardless of gender, which is nice to see, and doing so won’t affect your couple’s ability to have children.

A loveless marriage of gameplay

Lakeburg Legacies scratches the same basic itch as any city builder: it keeps you busy making sure you’re generating enough wood to make a farm so you can grow enough wheat to make enough bread to feed your town, while also making sure your industries are running as efficiently as possible. Essentially, it’s for those who love to create a well-oiled machine. But these mechanics just aren’t complex enough to make up for the shallow social aspects, making the entire game fall flat.

These limitations are annoying, but not dealbreakers by themselves. I kept myself busy by purchasing upgrades to my industry building (this, at least, I could do as I pleased), right up until I ran out of buildings to build. It was at that point I began to wonder what exactly the end goal was. What am I doing here? To what end am I endlessly marrying off my villagers the moment they turn 18? The game doesn’t seem to know either, and my game ended anticlimactically on the town’s 75th year, which is just how long I chose the game to go for.

Playing on the standard difficulty, I was able to complete every single prestige reward except for 1 on my very first playthrough. There are settings that would make the game harder, but what is there to draw me back to building the same town again? Not much. The last half of the game is too much of a slog to make even a 50-year game worthwhile.