Townscaper is a lovely game that almost acts like a city-building toy, allowing you to create cities by stacking and placing structures as you like.
When it comes to playing games idly (not playing idle games) there is often a lot of choice. I tend to call some games digital toys instead of video games, as that’s what they feel like to me. Townscaper is one of these games – a toy almost, that is fun to play around with and enjoy, but doesn’t have any real goal or end to it.
Townscaper takes you to a beautiful little world. You can click around to make houses form, and they stack together in a really satisfying way, creating bigger structures and twisting pathways. Almost like a form of building blocks, your town can be put together and made quickly, stacking buildings high and all around.
None of these structures sits very straight – it’s almost like a twisted and warped grid in Townscaper – which brings it’s own quirks. Not that you can’t tweak how things look. There is a panel that allows you to change the color of the building you are putting down or to zoom or move around to get a better view. You are placing these buildings in the middle of the sea, so at first they are a platform, and then they grow to be a house. You can place blocks around them, creating more buildings and odd shapes.
The way the world builds itself, with ease, moving windows to places that make sense with the new structural changes, or how it alters the place of the doors so that it makes more sense, is really lovely. It’s really relaxing as you put out a tall tower or make a wide building complex with a bunch of roads in between them, all above this beautiful water.
Townscaper, again, does not have a goal or ending. You can build at any time and just stop if you want. It’s all up to you, which is really quite freeing when it comes to just building as you wish. If you want, you can wipe the whole world clean and start again if you want. And, being able to create this world and watch it grow whenever I want has been really fun, especially in the idle moments of the evenings.
You can find Townscaper is available now on the Nintendo eShop, Microsoft Store, App Store, Google Play, and Steam.
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