TOWNSCAPER GARDEN SERIES
TOWNSCAPER GARDEN SIMULATOR

WhatвЂ™s missing from these titles are people, but this is arguably part of the fantasy theyвЂ™re presenting.

TOWNSCAPER GARDEN SIMULATOR

One particularly insightful reading of NintendoвЂ™s smash-hit life simulator proposes that the game is an expression of furusato, a Japanese term referring to, as New York University game professor Naomi Clark puts it, the вЂњold Japanese village home вЂ¦ The small town where your ancestors used to live.вЂќ Like Dorfromantik, it is pure вЂњidyllic fantasy.вЂќ TikTok is awash with cottagecore content venerating the вЂњ homestead life,вЂќ Etsy is filled with chintzy, nature-inflected products, and, lest we forget, Animal Crossing: New Horizons popularized the aesthetic globally within video games. Now that weвЂ™re living through our own technological revolution, itвЂ™s hardly surprising that such feelings should again surface collectively. He suggests to me that dorfromantik has its roots in the German industrial revolution when people, newly crammed into urban spaces and working long factory hours, felt the pull of their old rural lives.

The gameвЂ™s title, Dorfromantik, is a German compound word that describes a feeling of romanticism or вЂњnostalgic longing for the countryside,вЂќ according to Zwi Zausch, one quarter of the development team. Quaint villages, steamboat-filled waterways, and fields of golden corn stretch out organically across hexagonal tile pieces like a bucolic, prewar vision of Europe. It swaps clean minimalism for a cozier, hand-drawn aesthetic verging on cottagecore. Like Islanders, Dorfromantik is the city-builder reimagined as a puzzle game, albeit with a more obvious debt to tabletop strategy titles such as Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan. In fact, this is the same university that Dorfromantik emerged from two years later, the two small studios informally involving themselves in one anotherвЂ™s work. Perhaps remarkably, bearing in mind its assuredly polished form, Islanders is the product of an undergraduate degree program at the applied sciences university HTW Berlin. Of course, thereвЂ™s always sandbox mode, which makes the gameвЂ™s city-building core even more chill thereвЂ™s no score to worry about, just aesthetics.

Islanders isnвЂ™t entirely devoid of numbers, but it reorients them around a simple puzzle game: Make a pretty island, earn points, progress on to the next-an archipelago loop that feels like daydreaming on a beach. Perhaps youвЂ™ll construct a seaweed farm or a lumber yard, their placement on the landscape accompanied by fluttering numbers in the bottom-left corner of the screen. Islanders is a merciful reprieve from such demands, designed to be played in breezy, 20-minute bursts.Д«oot up the streamlined game and youвЂ™re presented with a small land mass surrounded by turquoise water.

TOWNSCAPER GARDEN SERIES

Over Zoom, Paul Schnepf, one third of IslandersвЂ™ development team, describes his game as a distillation of the вЂњfantasy'' offered by series such as Anno and Age of Empires-the way they allow you to build your own realm or kingdom, to вЂњbe the god of your own little world.вЂќ But to the casual observer at least, these games of long-form civilizational progression are often inscrutably complex, filled with extensive (not to mention exhausting) production chains and the micro-management of resources. Islanders arrived in 2019, followed by Townscaper, Cloud Gardens, and Dorfromantik, none precisely like the other but sharing a commitment to declutter, and perhaps upend the urban planning usually found in video games. The rationale is simple: What if you simplified the classic city-builder game ( SimCity, for example), even going so far as to cleave it of actual citizens? What if it had beautiful buildings simply for the sake of beautiful buildings, sprouting naturally from virtual rock, grassland, and water? The cumulative effects of these what-ifs has coalesced into a string of trancelike game experiences in recent years slowly expanding towns lull the mind, alleviating stress in a manner altogether less frenetic than titles of blockbuster action. Sign up for our Games newsletter and never miss our latest gaming tips, reviews, and features.

Townscaper garden