Doloc Town sees players exploring a post-apocalyptic world and building their dream farm from scratch. Read on to learn everything we know, our review of its Early Access, and more.
Everything We Know About Doloc Town
Doloc Town Plot
Doloc Town is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the remnants of civilization have coalesced into a makeshift settlement constructed from salvaged materials like old bridges and wagons. The protagonist arrives in this community and endeavors to transform it into a thriving haven amidst a desolation. As she explores the surrounding wilderness, ranging from abandoned ruins to marshes, she uncovers hidden secrets and gradually learns about her own destiny.
Doloc Town Gameplay
Doloc Town is a side-scrolling pixel-art farming simulation. Players begin with a small, contaminated plot and must cultivate crops using vertical planters and scaffolding to avoid toxic ground. The game has various weather conditions, such as acid rain and heatwaves, which require players to adapt by protecting crops with plastic coverings or installing lightning rods to harness energy for automated systems. Furthermore, players can unlock more advanced farming techniques and automations through a skill tree.
Beyond farming, Doloc Town also has exploration and combat elements. Players can venture into various biomes to gather resources. Combat is facilitated through customizable drone companions that assist in defending against hostile creatures, with options to modify their components for different combat styles. The game also features crafting, cooking, and fishing systems.
Doloc Town Release Date
Released in Early Access on May 8, 2025
Doloc Town launched in Early Access on May 8, 2025. The developers plan to add features over time through their Early Access roadmap, with the main story's completion targeted for the first half of 2026. The game will likely see its full release after that.
 Steam |
|||||
| Price | $14.99 Early Access |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Doloc Town Review (Early Access)
Stardew Valley, Terraria, and Cave Story All Rolled Into One
Sunlight filters through a patchwork canopy of pixelated trees. Somewhere nearby, a soft plop as an endyam hits the bottom of your box; somewhere farther, the clong of a pickaxe against ore. These are the moments that hum life to Doloc Town. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel for cozy life-sims, yes, but it doesn’t need to when the pieces it’s seemingly borrowing from are this well loved.
You plant crops and water them, sure. You dive into caves and collect ores, of course. You chat with quirky villagers, learn their stories, give them gifts, and slowly stitch yourself into the fabric of a pixelated little town nestled in a post-apocalyptic land. It has texture to it, something that evokes not just the rhythm of Stardew Valley’s daily life, but also the subterranean mystery of Terraria and the melancholy of Cave Story. It’s not as action-packed as the first, nor as metroidvania-lite as the second, but it echoes both in spirit.
Days don’t drag, chores don’t overwhelm, and even the deeper mechanics feel purposeful. It understands that the joy of a game like this comes from a rhythm. You fall into routines, into habits, then something delightful upends them. A new tool. A different NPC. A cave system you never noticed before. And before long, without even realizing it, you’re home.
Reaping What the Apocalypse Sowed
You start as Proti, a young woman returning to her childhood home, a ramshackle settlement built from rusted freight cars and the bones of a collapsed bridge. The world around you has ended, or at least it feels that way, but Doloc Town clings on through its stubbornness. The townsfolk offer you a poisoned plot of land and a simple proposition: to rebuild the farm, and perhaps, rebuild the town itself.
The post-apocalyptic world of Doloc Town unfolds before you gently, through small interactions with the town’s eclectic residents, each with their own stories, scars, and hopes. As you cultivate your vertical garden, shielded from acid rains and scorching heatwaves, you also cultivate relationships, piecing together the fragmented history of a community striving to find purpose amidst decay.
Doloc Town is deeply rooted in the soil of its setting. Unlike Stardew Valley or many Harvest Moon games, you’re not inheriting a sunny farmhouse with a red roof from your grandparent who sadly passed away. Instead, you’re handed a plot of poisoned dirt and told to make something grow—or at least try. The usual "pastoral escape" setup is swapped out for something more grounded, as you are now tending to the remnants of a world that fell apart, and the people still trying to live inside it.
It’s a refreshing take. The world of Doloc Town is worn and rusted, stitched together from metal scraps and fading memories, but it never feels hopeless. There’s always something worth salvaging. Trailers and tents replace cozy cottages, and your neighbors look defeated but never feel that way. And though the game’s friendship mechanics aren’t fully fleshed out yet (it is an Early Access game, after all), what’s already there hints at a more layered human drama than most life sims attempt. There’s always that sense that they’re people living through something, just like you.
There’s also a broader mystery simmering beneath the surface: of a collapsed society, an environmental catastrophe, and a resistance against the powers that helped bring it all down. That touch of dystopian storytelling adds teeth to the cozy loop.
One More Day
Underneath Doloc Town’s pixelated charm lies a surprisingly varied gameplay loop that defies the genre’s usual comfort zone. It’s a farming simulator through and through, sure—but one spliced with a bit of bullet hell combat, climate survival mechanics, and even vertical building features.
At its core is farming, and it's far from traditional. You're assembling planting boxes out of reclaimed scrap and stacking them into vertical farms. But farming here is also about weatherproofing, as acid rain might spoil your morning harvest or a heatwave could wipe out your sprouts. Unless it's raining, the weather is actively working against you. Satisfaction here comes not from rote repetition but from optimizing and slowly watching your strange little plot turn into a functional homestead.
Layered on top of that is a lightweight but surprisingly flexible combat and exploration system. You’re given a drone early on that shoots, shields, and supports depending on how you kit it out. Because of this, the combat leans toward auto-fire and bullet-hell lite, with enough customization to please both laid-back players and min-maxers alike.
The game has some Metroidvania elements to it, as exploration is tied directly to story progression and crafting upgrades. The more you venture out, the more pieces of the world’s past (and your own future) you uncover. Quests, meanwhile, are open-ended. You’re given direction through a stream of letters and requests from townsfolk, but rarely forced into doing them until you really want to do so. The freedom to pursue your own rhythm feels respectful of your curiosity and pacing.
But what I probably appreciate the most in Doloc town is how progression works. You begin cramped, your inventory laughably small, and your tech options limited. Early on in the game, I even had to force myself to gift townsfolk random junk just so I could collect another random junk that an enemy dropped five or so screens prior. But each day nudges you forward. You unlock more drones, you build new crafting stations, you automate your water supply, you discover new seeds, materials, upgrades, and so on. The tech tree is sprawling without being overwhelming, and it feeds beautifully into that addictive "just one more day" loop, as you want to see what small improvement you can make next, and how it changes the way you interact with the world.
An Early Access Game With a Lot Going For It
Doloc Town may have a lot going for it, but it’s not without its growing pains. Some of the friction comes from where you’d least want it: in the act of actually walking from screen to screen. The world itself is compelling and full of secrets worth seeking out, but getting from one place to another, especially after the tenth or twelfth time, can feel like a bit of a chore. The screen-by-screen navigation is slow-paced by design, but without any form of fast travel, it risks making necessary backtracking feel tedious. When you’ve got a full day of tasks across multiple areas, even the most scenic path can start to feel like a slog.
It’s at least good to know that Doloc Town is still in Early Access. And for a game at this stage to offer 20+ hours of story content, meaningful systems, and a sense of atmosphere is no small feat. What’s more encouraging is that the developer RedSaw Games Studio is keenly aware of where they want to take it. They’ve released an Early Access roadmap that outlines a future that includes ranches, more friendship arcs, expanded main story content, and quality-of-life features that could very well smooth over the game’s current rougher edges. If you’re the kind of player who enjoys watching a good thing become great over time—and maybe even shaping it along the way—there’s plenty of reason to invest early.
Even then, as it stands now, Doloc Town offers a depth and intentionality that many fully released farming games struggle to match. It’s not trying to be the next Stardew or Terraria or Cave Story, even if it borrows elements from all three. But it’s quietly carving out its own identity from the wreckage of a broken world. There’s work to be done, yes, but that’s part of the point. In a game about reclaiming broken things, maybe the beauty lies in watching it all slowly come together.
Game8 Reviews
You may also like...
Doloc Town Product Information
|
|
| Title | DOLOC TOWN |
|---|---|
| Release Date | May 8, 2025 |
| Developer | RedSaw Games Studio |
| Publisher | Logoi Games |
| Supported Platforms | PC (via Steam) |
| Genre | Cozy, Farming Sim, Metroidvania Lite |
| Number of Players | Single-Player (1) |
| ESRB Rating | TBA |
| Official Website | Doloc Town Official Discord |
