You're rarely doing anything significant, but you're forever reassured that you're doing a great job. The insidiously catchy looped music is broken by little chimes and fanfares for the most mundane of achievements, while greater victories are more loudly trumpeted complete a quest, and you don't just get a cute, celebratory swords-aloft animation, but a newspaper report that lauds your success. This is a game of a thousand tiny victories, where there's a constant sense of achievement or discovery, whether it's new treasures, weapons, monsters or buildings. You can spend the money you earn on developing the village or giving adventurers presents to keep them happy and improve their monster-slaying prowess.

Lob a bakery next to the armoury and adventurers will find the smell of fresh bread that much more appealing. Build a café next to an inn and you can increase the inn's rates. Adventurers take on quests, killing monsters and finding treasure, and you get to invest the spoils into developing your village to attract new dungeoneers. Like those games, it's built around a set of satisfying little feedback loops. Monsters will sometimes cheerfully announce that they're about to attack your village. But naturally it most resembles its publisher's previous works. It's a little like Final Fantasy spin-off My Life As A King, with a bit of SimCity thrown in for good measure. Your job is to build a town capable of attracting, clothing, feeding, arming and eventually housing adventurers. That it was titled RPG Story in Japan should give you a fair idea of what to expect. The localisation team has deviously tried to disguise it with a different name, but Dungeon Village is actually the latest in the increasingly long line of Story games. Some of us actually want to get some work done every now and again. If nothing this prolific publisher has released since has had quite the same impact, it's partly because people have sworn not to get hooked again.

Back in late 2010, Game Dev Story became something of an obsession among games critics, and not just because it focused on the industry we all know and love. Kairosoft doesn't so much make games as habits.

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