Beneath that simple surface, however, there's a lot of depth. Each villager has their own traits and aptitudes that affect how they perform and incline them towards certain jobs—such as a bonus in melee combat, or moving faster through forest. They also each have health and sanity to Dark And Darker Gold track, and must be manually sent to recover when they get low—either receiving medicine at a "balia" (a kind of bathhouse) or drinking away their fears at the mead tent. While health is lost as you'd expect, when they get attacked in the woods, sanity seems to drain slowly but constantly while they're outside the settlement, so it's vital to keep an eye on everyone's mental state as you go.

This moment to moment management is definitely more fiddly than I was hoping, however. Villagers feel like they have a bit less autonomy than they should—if you interrupt them in their work, say to move them away from danger or help construct a new building, they'll then just stand around waiting for further orders instead of returning to buy Dark And Darker Gold their main job. Keeping track of their abilities is awkward—I couldn't even figure out how to view their character sheet in-game, and ended up renaming them all to things like "Brawler" and "Reed Liker" between maps so I could remember who was who.