The city-building genre is absolutely having a moment right now, be it at the big end of the market (City skylines 2) or, more popularly, the smaller end (just look at Steam’s sales charts any day of the week). It’s easy to slide into this latter category Landscapeone of my favorite examples of the genre in years.
Landscape is a game set on a hex-based world in which you are asked to place medieval buildings on as optimal a piece of land as possible. For buildings that harvest resources, like lumberjacks or hunting lodges, this means placing them as close as possible to trees or wild animals, and for more advanced structures, placing them next to them other Building. The more optimal your position is based on the number of resources and adjacent structures, the higher the score you get.
You can’t just build anything though, this is a very board game-like experience where you have to choose from decks based on main categories (fishing, village, farming, etc.) and then you’re dealt a hand of cards at a time, which can be played to create a to place buildings on the map. Starting with just a handful, as a game progresses you will unlock more cards for a deck, then more decks with new buildings.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. village romance did a lot of it. Just like… did islanders. I loved both games and I love them Landscape For the same reasons, because it takes the essence of a city builder, breaks it down into the simplest means of execution, and then makes the whole thing incredibly relaxing.
There are objectives, whether you’re playing the game’s specific challenge maps (which let you solve city-building optimization puzzles) or the more fun sandbox mode (which just lets you go and gives you bonus objectives to earn points with), though they never feel rushed. It’s nice to look at, there’s no time limit and the whole thing is just incredibly cool dropping a little farm here and oh look a town square there isn’t that nice.
The way each tile’s art flows into the next, and the little pops every time you place a building make the whole experience extremely satisfying. I’ve spent the past week launching this whenever I’ve had downtime, and instead of trying to complete any goals or objectives I’ve just scrolled the map launching a town like a bob 14th century steed. Bobbe Rosse.
However, if spending all of your time in a Zen-like state doesn’t appeal to you, you can still play this thing if you want (and need to do so to complete some of the harder/bigger maps). The game’s scoring system stacks instead of staying consistent. So if you drop a hunter’s hut early on and collect a ton of points from nearby wildlife, you won’t lose those points if you later build a medieval village over it. This makes each card an intriguing exercise in planning ahead, as you have to start thinking about trees, fish, and deer before progressing through the decks and shifting gears, and instead start thinking about grand mansions and taverns.
Landscape is still in Early Access on Steam and is available now.
