Whiskerwood looks like an adorable game of cat and mouse, but in reality it's a brutal city builder where my grossly incompetent governance never goes unpunished for long

As someone who's spent an excessive amount of time micromanaging entire civilizations, the industrious little rodents of Whiskerwood have to be the cutest critters I've ever lorded over. The adorable cat-and-mouse city builder puts you in charge of a fledgling mouse colony filled with hardworking, skilled laborers who don't seem to know they're the only thing of real value in the equation. Their only ask is that you meet their most basic needs—you know, food, shelter, clothing, the bare minimum kind of thing. But even that grows difficult as supplies run thin and your feline overlords keep demanding a bigger slice of the pie.

When times got tough, I figured my mousy subordinates would surely understand going to bed hungry a night or two. I didn't expect them to question it, nor did I think they would spread ugly rumors of my misgivings, further stoking rebellious fervor. Well, I say rumors, but yeah—I did overpay the monarchy several times in hopes of courting shiny infrastructure upgrades while leaving the mice to starve. I tried explaining that I thought this society was too cute to be of serious consequence, and that they really needed my useless governance negotiating days of food for a wind chime. I don't think they liked that.

Anyway, long story short, the mice revolted. And that's how my first city, New Gouda, fell in an impressive speedrun of societal collapse. I repeated my sins a few times before really getting the hang of it and accepting that Whiskerwood only looks like a warm and fuzzy city sim. In reality, it's a brutal balancing act of complex systems that demands you take your duty leading the Whiskers—its mousy proletariat—seriously.

Life on the procgen archipelago gets rough, but I finally established a successful colony with the founding of Brieton. I've had some close calls with the game's ruthless kitty monarchy, the Claws, though it's usually just firing a cannonball or two after I fail to pay taxes. It's a screw up that's (mostly) easy to fix, or at least it is when compared to the threat of colonial uprising that comes with betraying your workers. I'll occasionally get a little too excited and strain resources while making decorations, but it's not like aesthetic philosophy is an entirely useless concept here. The mice need a little joy in their surroundings.

The general flow, environmental fixtures, and setup of your colony are all factors just as important to keeping your island citizens happy as they are in city builder cousins like Cities Skylines, but Whiskerwood takes a zoomed-in look at a smaller populace. It's more akin to colony sims like Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld with a heavy focus on production chains, political conflict, and conquering harsh landscapes. The system gives me a chance to hone in on individual mice too, and when I find one that's particularly gifted and wired for productivity, I invest in advancing their talents.

It's all just a big cat-and-mouse balancing act, but I find the old adage "slow and steady wins the race" particularly helpful for surviving those first few weeks. I stick to the basics early on, keeping my population small while preparing for the first difficulty spike in winter. The cold snap is where things really took a turn for the worst in New Gouda and several of the attempts that followed. I wiped out half the island by making some mice sleep outside while I hoarded wealth for later investments. Despite Whiskerwood's flurry of tutorial warnings, I learned the hard way my colony couldn't get by on campfire heat alone. The surviving workers expressed grievances after seeing their dead, frozen neighbors, and well, you know the rest of the story.

The more I stew on my failures, the more I realize Whiskerwood is quite grim, but I will say some items and Whisker traits make me think a colony run by more competently negligent monarchists works fine. I haven't experimented with them yet, but I've researched some gross displays of wealth, like a golden feline statue meant to intimidate passing workers. I've also noticed some mice like to do a little class betrayal, but I've tried to keep those folks sequestered from my island. It's only acceptable when I'm the one exploiting the labor here.

Anyway, I've found enough success with the path that lets me rest my bourgeois head at night, and ethical motivations aside, profits from sloppy shortcuts in a society where mice don't have their most basic needs met won't last. The Claws always come back, beating down my door while asking the Whiskers to give up more for less.

It's all surprisingly robust for a game in early access, and I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible in its current state. I've yet to really push back on the monarchy, and mostly stick to paying its unfair tax rate in full and on time with zero bribery involved. I'm eager to see how far I can push the despots when I try to cut my island's over-reliance on their paltry supply shipments, but Brieton just got showers and warehouses bigger than a shoebox, so I don't think I'm anywhere close to that… yet.