Earth of Oryn is an early access kingdom builder, strategy simulation game where you try build a kingdom of your own in the wild. Read on to learn everything we know, our first impressions of its early access build, and if it's worth your money.
Everything We Know About Earth of Oryn
Earth of Oryn Story
Although a detailed narrative is yet to be fully fleshed out for Earth of Oryn’s Early Access build, the general story themes of surviving the harshness of the wilderness on your own through the grit and ingenuity of your own people are a common theme among the game’s three existing mission scenarios. As development continues for Earth of Oryn, new mission scenarios and narrative elements are expected to be added down the line.
Earth of Oryn Gameplay
Earth of Oryn’s core gameplay features center around its faux-isometric view, grid-based building placement, and pausable RTS task assignment and progression. Players must build up their kingdom’s various resource-gathering buildings and stockpiles, particularly Gold, Stone, Wood, and Food, to create basic infrastructure for their people as new citizens join in from the wilderness and mission scenario goals are met.
Depending on the scenario, players will either need to meet a specific threshold for certain criteria, such as happiness and Security, or survive against a set number of enemy waves by creating a self-sustaining kingdom through careful allocation of resources and strategic placement of buildings.
Released for Early Access on January 20, 2026
Earth of Oryn was released for Steam Early Access on January 20, 2026, for $14.99. The game’s 1.0 release date is yet to be announced by its developers.
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 Steam |
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| $14.99 |
Earth of Oryn Review [Early Access]
Too Early For Anything Worthwhile
As someone who regularly dips their toes in the uncertain waters of Steam Early Access, I consider myself someone who understands the process of discovery that comes with many titles-to-be that choose to surface from its depths. It almost always begins with novelty—that pull of a new way to play a classic mechanic, maybe even a unique or nostalgic art style to go with it—and can end in one of three ways: resounding success, absolute failure, or utter mediocrity.
Earth of Oryn finds itself in an odd middle stage between the three, where it is neither good, bad, nor mediocre…somehow. It’s a strange state to be in, one achieved by a game that lost all of its momentum on the wind-up and managed to deliver something less than passable as a result. Let’s dive right in, shall we?
Building A Kingdom Of Your Own From Scratch
At its core, Earth of Oryn is a bog-standard kingdom builder akin to the likes of Kingdoms & Castles, Fabledom, or, if you’re willing to stretch the definition a bit, Town to City. The narrative setup to your kingdom management is rather barebones, if at all existent, as it’s mostly implied through scenario mission descriptions and tutorial dialogue.
Basically, you’re someone of great importance trying to tough it out in the wilderness and create your own kingdom. Whether this is brought about by political turmoil from your previous kingdom or done on a whim isn’t really explored, at least not yet. What narrative pieces the game does give you are mostly about what comes after you choose to make your own kingdom from scratch.
This narrative comes in the form of mission scenarios, sort of like how retro titles used to go about campaigns and story modes, which, as you’ll see, isn’t the biggest retro influence the game has by a long shot. At the moment, the game only has three mission scenarios, including the tutorial, and a supplementary custom mode, so its story really doesn’t seem to be the biggest piece in its arsenal at the moment. That begs the question of what its main draw is, though.
Retro-style 2.5D Designs Give This Game That Star Factor
Even if you haven’t played them before, most gamers have at least heard of the retro RTS and tycoon games like Command and Conquer, StarCraft, RollerCoaster Tycoon, and so forth. They’re cornerstones of an entire era of PC gaming, and with them came a certain aesthetic. Not quite pixel art, not quite HD, but something in between and oftentimes isometric.
Now, picture that look, and combine it with actual 3D graphics, a rotatable world grid, and you’ve got what Earth of Oryn’s rocking for the cobbles and steeples of its medieval world. It’s actually quite beautiful, seeing the pixelated treeline bob in the distance, thinking how neat it all looks before rotating the whole landscape and seeing the same trees geek out in 3D.
Earth of Oryn is an early access kingdom builder, strategy simulation game where you try build a kingdom of your own in the wild. Read on to learn everything we know, our first impressions of its early access build, and if it's worth your money.
Surface Level Gameplay at Best, Devoid of Content at Worst
If that script flip seemed rather abrupt to you, then you’re not alone. I, too, was partaking in the joy of the game’s graphics, just as you were reading me gush about them, but it took a direct left turn into a pit of despair the moment I tried to play the game.
As a kingdom builder, Earth of Oryn really isn’t all that unique mechanics-wise. You build on a world grid with semi-controllable workers carrying out your orders to construct, gather, and attack. If you’ve played any RTS, you’ve seen this before. Research is facilitated through specific buildings, and workers do the heavy-lifting (literally) of your logistics. All you have to do is have a vision and a basic understanding of resource management.
If that was it, then this game would’ve fallen under mediocre, perhaps even a bit above, owing to its pretty good graphics and semi-decent optimization. Unfortunately, that’s only taking quality into account. One must also consider how much content the game actually has because—oh boy—it doesn’t have much at all.
I mean, I’ve mentioned the story scenarios, all three of them. That would be a respectable number for an early access title, if not for the fact that among those three is the tutorial, and that the average playtime for each scenario maxes out at an hour. That might seem like a long time, but for this kind of game, it’s no time at all. Heck, planning out your next district of high-income workers in Fabledom would take that long, not even counting the building time. This isn’t just abysmal, it’s downright pitiful.
That’s not even the worst of it. The game has three tech levels at most, all wholly achievable within the first 15 minutes of a mission scenario, by the way. That on its own would’ve been bad for the game, but there’s also the fact that they do not work as intended, if at all. I’ve gone through the tutorial multiple times trying to make heads or tails of the game’s research system, which seems simple enough, but I cannot, for the life of me, actually build whatever the new tech levels say they unlocked.
Carpentry unlocked "new wooden buildings" which I thought was funny considering the buildings I built before the Laboratory to research that exact tech were all made of wood, but I let it slide. After I check my buildable preabs list, nothing. Same thing with Masonry and Stone Buildings. Says new, unique buildings have been unlocked, but nothing new pops up.
My best guess is that these were all available from the start, hence the lack of anything new when the tech is unlocked. That does explain how I could make stone castle walls and two-story houses when my population still lived in tents and had one farm to their name.
Vestiges of Good Ideas Not Yet Made Real
My problem doesn’t just lie in the normal tech tree, because the game actually has two or three. The only reason I’m not sure about the number of tech trees is that, for starters, calling them "trees" is disingenuous because they neither branch nor expand, but also, in the case of the elusive third tree, it’s literally just one upgrade common to all buildings.
It’s like they tried to make an overall tech tree accessible via the Laboratory, a government/cultural tech tree accessible via the Assembly, and a unique upgrade tree for each of the buildables, except they forgot to do any of that after putting down the roots of the idea.
These three only make up a fraction of the game’s many, many seemingly unfinished ideas scattered about, like the Zoning Tool. This tool works well enough and even has a cool visual and adjustable zoning parameters, but I just don’t know what it’s for. Supposedly, it’s used to direct your people to build residential tents in a certain place, harvest a specific set of highlighted trees, or specifically target selected rocks for harvest. As you may have guessed, it doesn’t accomplish any of that.
Your citizens only build in some of the allotted residential areas, even if they need more living quarters, trees you never highlighted get harvested (or vice-versa, because of course), stones from across the map get priority harvest status, and farm plots just straight up don’t get tilled for no explained reason.
What about storage? They at least got that done properly, right? Wrong. Never enough storage to hold what you harvest, even with only one building and worker for that resource, and multiple buildings serving as possible storage depots. It’s like the game is fine-tuned to not function as intended, at least not for the player. If this chaos and lack of agency is not an antithesis to strategy, then I don’t know what is.
Too Early Access for My Taste
All of these errors, pitfalls, and misfires reek of early access woes. The lack of content would’ve been excusable if not for the complete mechanical failure of what little content the game ended up having. The unique visuals would’ve been a great selling point if there had been a game at all to match.
What we ended up getting is essentially a pointless and disappointing nostalgia trip that only managed to make us hunger for other games more by showing us exactly what we couldn’t have in this one. Earth of Oryn, as it is, is all wind-up and no follow-through, but not for the lack of trying. I can see the pieces the devs are setting up, and I sincerely hope they manage to make something of this game yet.
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Earth of Oryn Product Information
 |
|
| Title | EARTH OF ORYN |
|---|---|
| Release Date | January 20, 2026 (Steam) |
| Developer | Earth of Oryn |
| Publisher | Earth of Oryn |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Simulation, Strategy |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Earth of Oryn Official Website |
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