Virtual Villagers is a casual game created by independent game studio Last Day of Work. It features a tribe of little people who survive a shipwreck and must build a new life on the island of Isola. It has five sequels; Virtual Villagers 2: The Lost Children, Virtual Villagers 3: Secret City, Virtual Villagers 4: The Tree of Life, Virtual Villagers 5: New Believers, and Virtual Villagers 6: Divine Destiny. Spin-offs include "Virtual Families", "Virtual Families 2". "Virtual Town", and eventually "Virtual Families 3".
- Virtual Villagers: A New Home takes place after a volcano eruption destroys the island that a small tribe lived on. They escape in boats and float for days before crashing onto the beautiful island of Isola. Once there, you must build a tribe while solving puzzles to unlock the mysteries of Isola. It was remade as Virtual Villagers Origins for iOS/Android in 2012.
- Virtual Villagers 2: The Lost Children: Two Too Dumb to Live villagers venture into a cave and fall down a waterfall, landing on the western shore of Isola, where they find some lost children. They begin making a new tribe there while discovering more mysteries.
- Virtual Villagers 3: Secret City: A group of villagers venture to the northern shore of Isola, where they find an abandoned civilization. They decide to make a new tribe there and discover more mysteries of Isola.
- Virtual Villagers 4: The Tree of Life: The game features, what else, a tree of life on the eastern shore of Isola that your villagers have to nurture back to health. This was the very first game that you could select what villagers you wanted to start out with.
- Virtual Villagers 5: The New Believers: The game finally makes the player a literal god, as they have to get the "heathen" original inhabitants of Isola living in the island's center to believe in them, a giant flying hand god which is worshiped by the villagers.
- Virtual Villagers Origins 2: Technically not a sequel, it is more of a reboot. Released in 2017 after 7 years. Released exclusively for iOS/Android.
- Virtual Villagers 6: Divine Destiny: Released in 2024 as a Free-to-Play game on mobile devices, where you help your villagers save Isola from a curse laid by an Evil Sorcerer.
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Tropes in the series
- Ad Reward: In Virtual Villagers 6, you can either spend Lavastones to spin the wheel and give a villager a random perk, or you can watch an ad to spin it for free.
- Aerith and Bob: Very very common in the Virtual Families series. You get names like "Bingono", "Gregetto", "Crisino", and, occasionally "normal" names like Sophie, Chad, and Chip.
- Alliterative Title: Virtual Villagers.
- Always Identical Twins: Occasionally a mother will have twins or (rarely) triplets. They are simply clones of each other.
- Anti-Frustration Features: In Virtual Families 2, pets (which are expensive to purchase) are immortal. They won't starve to death, and they'll survive each passing generation.
- Anyone Can Die: Children are just as likely to die as any other villager, usually from starvation or disease. The occasional "Island Events", which can have a good, bad or neutral outcome depending on player choices, can also affect children, including their death or disappearance (with the implication of death or possibly worse).
- Art Evolution: The villagers' character designs become more refined starting in Virtual Villagers 3 and also the background is decorated like a real life island unlike the first 2 games.
- Artificial Stupidity: If your villagers are hungry, instead of doing something like gathering more food or researching so a different way to bring in food can be discovered, they'll wander around worrying about being hungry. They'll even actually leave jobs they've been assigned just to walk around worrying.
- Bilingual Bonus: Isola is Italian for "island". In other words, the island's name is... Island.
- Big Head Mode: In Virtual Villagers 6, you can spend Lavastones to randomly give your villager a big head.
- Blackout Basement: The beginning of Virtual Villagers 6 takes place in the dark, and areas are inaccessible until you light up torches. When you acquire the power to light up dark spots with Healing Light, darkness shrouds unlit areas at night again, and villagers won't approach them if they hate darkness.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Virtual Villagers Origins and its sequel have in-app purchases that let you replenish your food supply or instantly gain more tech points.
- A Child Shall Lead Them: The Golden Child in the first game. In the third game, The Secret City, it's possible for a child to become chief of the tribe. New Believers introduces god powers that include youth restoration, allowing you to turn a villager into a child.
- The Chosen One: The Golden Child in the first game, who will bring peace and fortune to the villagers. In the fifth game, it's revealed that at some point he went missing.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The heathen villagers in New Believers wear colored masks signifying their rank.
- Blue (Heathen Villagers): These villagers are completely docile and carry out tasks similar to your own villagers. They can be converted by having a devotee "explain the truth" to them, but you have to wait for a cooldown period before trying again afterwards or they'll just run away.
- Yellow (Heathen Guards): Unlike their blue-masked brethren, yellow-masked heathens will actively chase your villagers if they get too close to their guarded areas, causing your villager to stop what they're doing and run away. They can only be converted by using the Earthquake power several times.
- Red (Senior Heathen Guards): While the red-masked heathens are fully docile, their masks are so terrifying to your villagers that they will immediately run away if they get too close to them, meaning they can't be lured away from areas like the yellow-masked heathens can. These heathens can also only be converted by using the Earthquake power.
- Purple (Heathen Masters): Only four of these heathens exist, one in each major area of the village (i.e. farm, research lab, mausoleum, and hospital). Converting them involves a specific task for each of them: healing the Heathen Doctor, rebuilding the ruined aqueduct for the Heathen Farmer, impressing the Heathen Scientist with a scientific problem three times, and beating the Heathen Builder in a building contest by using the Time Warp Power.
- The Heathen Chief is the leader of the heathens and is distinguished by his decorative mask. He is usually found at the northeastern corner of the village which is hidden behind the bushes and he sometimes comes out of there. He's a Master of All and converting him will require all purple masked Heathens to be converted and his daughter’s necklace fully reassembled. Like the purple masked Heathens, he's unaggressive and will not affect your villagers. Upon his conversion, it’s heavily implied that his daughter was the girl from the “forbidden love" story in The Secret City.
- Company Cross-References: The fish of fertility from Virtual Villagers: A New Home is the same fish of fertility from Fish Tycoon. Likewise, the plants and fish you are trying to discover in Plant Tycoon and Fish Tycoon come from Isola, as are the bottled weather effects you can get in the Virtual Families games.
- Convection, Schmonvection: In Virtual Villagers 6, villagers can walk near the lava in the Lava Temple without dying of heat exhaustion.
- Continuity Nod: In Divine Destiny, the title of the puzzle for building all three huts to increase the population cap is called "A New Home".
- Death of a Child: Implied with the ghost girl in Virtual Families 3. A letter mentions that she died in a freak accident (and further random events reveal that she drowned after falling through thin ice) before your little people move in and can only be put to rest by finding her doll.
- Children can die of sickness or starvation during the game, and if a nursing villager dies, her baby will too.
- Dismantled MacGuffin: The Gong of Wonder in The Lost Children is broken into four pieces scattered across Isola; retrieving them and assembling the gong serve as puzzles.
- The necklace in New Believers, also broken into four pieces and divided among each of the purple-masked heathens. Solving their puzzles both converts them and yields a piece of the necklace, which belonged to the chief's daughter. Returning the reassembled necklace to him reminds him of his love for his daughter and inspires him to convert.
- Early Game Hell: Most of the early game can be rough trying to train most of the villagers, as being untrained has a high failure rate, but the higher the experience goes, the lower the failure rate. This is made even more difficult by the first food sources you have access to in the beginning being finite — so if you don't figure out solutions fast, your villagers will starve.
- Earthquakes Cause Fissures: In Virtual Villagers 6, earthquakes cause cracks to open up on the surface for a while. Your villagers can retrieve items in them using rope.
- Express Delivery: Villagers do not age while having babies, instead giving birth to them the moment they leave the Love Shack, as opposed to real life because it will take months to give birth to children.
- Fictional Social Network:
- In Virtual Families 2 and 3, people get emails about Fakebook statuses from their friends.
- Virtual Families 3 lets you use the dating app Cinder to find potential spouses.
- Freemium Timer: In Virtual Villagers 6, gatherables take time to regenerate while crafting takes a while before you get the final result. Both can be sped up by paying Lavastones.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: In Virtual Villagers 6, where there's a day-night cycle, villagers can idle by "soaking up the sun", even if the moon is out.
- A God Is You: Implicit in the first four games, but explicit in the fifth, New Believers, where the player has to convert a tribe of 'heathens' to the worship of the 'Guiding Hand' (that is, the player).
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: In New Believers, you play as a giant flying hand god worshipped by your villagers. You can work miracles, called God Powers, that are key to solving the game's puzzles using energy that is increased by increasing the quantity and quality of your worship — your village's population growing, collecting relics, having the villagers carve a large block of stone in the middle of the village into a giant hand idol, and upgrading the Spirituality technology.
- G-Rated Sex:
- When you drop your villagers on another villager of the opposite gender, a kiss sound is played, the two will head to the shack, and the woman will come out with a baby. Occasionally before the male even gets to the shack, she will come out with a baby. If the female is prevented from going to the shack, the baby will appear out of thin air in the mother's arms, fully dressed in swaddling clothes, which she will look after for two whole years. However, this Easy Level Trick was patched out in later games, where you need to wait until the parents leave the Love Shack to see if the baby's born. There is another Easy Level Trick, however: if the population counter goes up, you know the female has been impregnated.
- In Virtual Families, when a couple "tries to make a baby," they go to their bedroom, the woman throws rose petals on the bed while the man jumps up and down excitedly, and then they stand on the bed hugging and smiling with their eyes closed.
- Green Around the Gills: Later games have sick villagers get green-faced when sick.
- Gotta Catch 'Em All: The collectibles, which allow you to have a greater population for each completed set and award Research Points for duplicates. Only children can gather them since they'll focus more on their jobs upon reaching working age (14). The fourth game gives the collectibles a unique purpose in addition to the usual +5 limit to the population for each finished collection:
- Finding all the wind flutes allows rarer collectibles to be found when the mist comes in every two in-game hours.
- Finding all the lab gear makes scientists much more productive (produce more tech points).
- Finding all the fish scales lets valuable golden fish appear in fish nets.
- Finding all the mausoleum pieces lets villagers' ghosts appear at random times and point out rare collectibles.
- Guide Dang It!:
- Virtual Families 3 can become slightly annoying with the ghost girl, who will always randomly appear looking for her doll. The doll is part of the toy collection but will never spawn normally—a random event must occur where a character is actively searching for it.
- Virtual Villagers 5: New Believers never directly explains to players how to convert red and yellow heathens, only blue ones.
- Guilt-Based Gaming:
- If you leave your villagers alone for too long, you're likely to return to nothing but skeletons.
- In the Virtual Families games, one of the adults in the household will send you an email asking where you've been, and that they thought you weren't coming back to take care of them anymore.
- In Virtual Families 3, a random event will allow you to sell your pet for 8,000 coins. If you agree, a message pops up saying that you felt "a deep pang of regret as soon as your beloved pet left your sight. Was the money really worth it?"
- Healing Light: Virtual Villagers 6 has the power to acquire called "Healing Light", which cures your villagers of illness.
- Hidden Depths: Though it can be missable, the Virtual Villagers and Virtual Families series have some semi-complex lore.
- The island of Isola from Virtual Villagers faced lots of ruin and tragedy during its ancient days. At some point, all the regions of the island were lively and inhabited until "the forbidden love", which led to many deaths and displacements, including the destruction of a magic gong.
- The second Virtual Families game features Bill and Margaret, the previous owners, who were planning to build and renovate a house for a large family of their own someday. However, due to unknown circumstances, Margaret refused to adopt children, and Bill soon died. His funeral/wake was held inside one of the rooms of the house (which your characters may sometimes smell for some reason). Following Margaret's death, squatters moved in and vandalized the house, which was eventually damaged by the elements and age.
- The third Virtual Families game features previous owners Kevin and Rachel, who lived in the house with their daughter, who was five. Tragically, the little girl drowned while skating on thin ice and her bereaved parents eventually moved away but left her favorite doll behind. She now haunts the house, looking for it endlessly, which is something random events touch on every now and again.
- Identity Amnesia: In The Lost Children, a random event can occur where a villager is hit on the head by a coconut and loses all their memories. The villager's name permanently becomes "?" unless changed, and what happens next depends on the player's input: the villager can even be hit on the head again and either become a genius or lose all their common sense.
- In-Universe Game Clock: Virtual Villagers 6 has a visible day-night cycle that changes every several minutes. Some puzzles can only be completed at night.
- Item Caddy:
- While children can't work until they're 14, they have a keen eye for collectibles, making them valuable for gathering them to finish collections and gain Set Bonuses.
- In Virtual Villagers 6, a lemur occasionally visits the village for a limited time to automatically fetch items from cracks for you. You can pay real money to keep it forever.
- Item Crafting: In Virtual Villagers 6, you can build a Crafting Hut, where you can combine materials gathered in the overworld to make new items, which are needed for puzzles. Invalid combinations and valid ones that you can't craft at your current Crafting level will waste your items, while you can speed up the crafting process with Lavastones.
- Just Add Water: In most of the series, villagers can produce potions or stews by mixing water and herbs (and in some cases foodstuffs) and cooking on the fire. Results of drinking these concoctions can vary.
- Lamarck Was Right: Children inherit a small bit of the highest skill from one of their parents and will automatically train themselves in that skill when they turn 14.
- Level-Up Fill-Up: In New Believers and Divine Destiny, upgrading your village's Spirituality instantly refills your energy to use your godly powers, in addition to increasing its Cap.
- Minor Living Alone:
- In the main series, if some disaster happens and only one or two kids are left alive, they might be able to keep going by finding mushrooms. This is really only a short-term solution, though, and the player has to pray they'll last until they grow old enough to work.
- Virtual Families can have children living alone if their parents have both died. Although they cannot work, the kids can collect items and sell duplicates on the internet. Especially if the parents left a moderate amount of money, they can get along quite well, and buy enough food to keep themselves alive.
- Mission-Pack Sequel: While the sequels introduce new mechanics and puzzles, the core mechanic of managing an island tribe remains the same.
- No Antagonist: Averted in New Believers, where the masked villagers nicknamed heathens will oppose you and guard most of the areas. The ones wearing yellow masks in particular will actively chase your villagers away if they get too close to their guarded areas.
- Personality Mechanic: A villager's likes and dislikes aren't just for show; they also affect how often they'll interact with certain objects on the island. In fact, they'll refuse to interact with an object if they dislike it—villagers who dislike swimming will run out of the water if put in it, for instance.
- Piranha Problem: In Virtual Villagers 6, a school of piranhas blocks the way to the key to the crypt. They must be distracted with bait paste in order to retrieve it.
- Pixel Hunt: The series is very prone to this trope. The player has to pick up a sprite and drop it on a hotspot to get a particular reaction, such as starting a villager working on a task. This is even harder than clicking on the hotspot, since when clicking, the cursor gives a more accurate indication of screen position. The hotspots in the ports to iOS and Android are possibly even more difficult to find than in games played on desktop or laptop computers because of the smaller touch screens.
- Play Every Day: Starting in Origins, a crate washes ashore every 24 hours, which contains goods such as food or tech points. The daily gift accumulates until the grand prize on the 30th day, a huge stash of food and tech points.
- Playlist Soundtrack: The game cycles between a few songs as you manage your island.
- Poison Mushroom: In Virtual Villagers 6, poison dart frogs sometimes hop around the map and make any villager who touches them sick. They're easily mistaken for the collectible mushrooms due to their small size and similar color, making children more vulnerable to them. Occasionally, a heron drops by to eat all the poison dart frogs, and you can pay real money to permanently keep it.
- Promoted to Playable: In New Believers, another tribe of 'heathens' appears, which is controlled by the AI. The player can 'convert' them individually using various methods and they become members of your tribe.
- Random Event: Sometimes, random events happen as you play the games, which may give you extra food, give you new villagers, boost a villager's skills, or kill them, for example. Some of these events give you choices that give you different results. In the earlier games, some of the events could actually kill your villagers or otherwise remove them from the tribe permanently.
- Reincarnation: In Virtual Villagers 6, once you open the crypt, you can pay Lavastones to reincarnate a dead villager as a child and retain all their skills.
- Remixed Level: The kraken-repelling ritual puzzle in Virtual Villagers Origins 2 recapitulates several mid-game puzzles from the third and fourth original-series games.
- Robinsonade: This is in the main series, especially the first game. The tribe's original home was destroyed in a volcano eruption, and only 5-7 survivors are left to explore and settle a new island.
- Same Plot Sequel: Virtual Villagers Origins 2 follows the same structure as Virtual Villagers 1: A New Home, where a bunch of people flee from an island due to a volcano erupting and end up on an island they nickname Isola.
- Screen Shake: In Virtual Villagers 6, the screen shakes whenever an earthquake happens.
- Screen Tap: In Virtual Families, a sick character will tap on the screen to get the player's attention if they haven't noticed the illness.
- Sequel Hook: In general, each game's ending adds more to the lore and things to discover:
- In A New Home, after the Golden Child unblocks the cave mouth, a fresh bowl of fruit is found inside, suggesting that Isola isn't as deserted as it appears.
- In The Lost Children, the writing on the wall, hidden behind the vines, reveals what happened to the parents: Upon learning that magic was being practiced on Isola again, they set out to find the missing pieces of the Gong of Wonder, leaving the children under the care of one "Tofo", who mysteriously disappeared at some point. The parents never return.
- In The Secret City, solving the sun disk puzzle causes the spirits of the chief and princess to appear, who explain that their forbidden love led to war between the factions of Nature and Magic, resulting in Isola's mostly-depopulated state at the start of the series.
- At the end of The Tree of Life, after the titular tree is restored to full health, a leaf flies off and is discovered by a masked member of some unknown faction, revealed in the next game to be the heathens.
- Shout-Out: The environment and lore of "Virtual Villagers: Origins 2" are chock full of references to the Cthulhu Mythos.
- One of the early puzzles is a ritual where four of your villagers worship in front of a Kraken Statue with a tentacle-bearded humanoid face.
- Another early puzzle involves removing a giant stone from a pond in the center of the island, through which a giant squid emerges. The last puzzle in the first act of the game is a complex ritual to drive it away. The second act of the game opens with a volcanic eruption that destroys most of the buildings on the island and alters its landscape. The exposition character attributes it to the anger of "the Old Ones."
- One random pop-up event is a mashup reference to "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Nameless City." Another is titled "Colors Out of Space." In a third, a text under a drawing of people being terrorized by a monster can be translated to read, "From the depths of ocean’s keep, awoke the thing from endless sleep!"
- Star-Crossed Lovers: The chief and the princess from The Secret City were members of the same faction who fell in love, when a marriage between a princess of Nature and a prince of Magic — who were chosen by the elders — was required to keep peace between the factions. When the factions discovered this forbidden romance, the tribes went to war and their civilization fell to ruin. The remaining members of the civilization would later become the heathens from New Believers.
- Super-Speed: A villager who likes running moves faster than the others on the map, which is useful in getting tasks done faster. On the other hand, a villager who dislikes running moves like molasses.
- Surprise Incest: Your villagers have zero qualms about breeding with their relatives, so you may leave the game running for a while and return to find that two villagers engaged in a little inbreeding while you weren't looking. It's not as prevalent from Virtual Villagers 2 onwards, as that game introduced a lineage mechanic that showed who a child's parents are, making it easier to keep track of who is related to whom (though that doesn't stop the incest from occurring, intentionally or otherwise, because the relationships are cleared upon a child becoming an adult).
- Themed Cursor: In New Believers, as in all the VV games, the cursor is turned into a hand. The villagers worship the "giant flying hand in the sky" (that is, the player).
- Video Game Caring Potential: Unsurprisingly, given its status as a Simulation Game. These people have names and to a certain extent even personalities. You see their lives from infancy to old age. It's possible to get very attached to particular villagers, or to your village as a whole.
- Virtual Paper Doll: One of the tasks in all the sequels is to build a "clothing hut"; afterwards you can choose different outfits for your villagers by paying Research Points, functioning as a sort of Money Sink. Although there's no clothing hut in the first game, a Cheat Code (probably left in by the game's designers by accident) is widely known which allows you to change a villager's clothes in that game as well.
