village romance was released in Early Access on Steam for some timeand was excellent even then, but it’s out now, and as the headline says, you should definitely play it.
The game can very loosely be called a city builder, but that’s not entirely fair as that label conjures up images of City skylinesor SimCityGames with a certain complexity and zones and Rules. village romance can have the construction of settlements as one of them its most basic task, but in its execution it couldn’t be further from those games.
Instead, it’s a lot more of a board game. You will be given an empty square, the game will feed you a random hexagon Tile by tile – maybe a little river, maybe a few cottages – and all you have to do is lay them down. The only rules are that it must touch another tile that is already down. That’s it! You can get points for how “connected” that tile is if you want to play like that (buildings connected to buildings, river tiles with more rivers, etc.), but if you also just want to play like a sandbox and build whatever the hell Hell comes, then you’re free to do that too.
That’s how Riley described it Writing about the Early Access version last year:
In the midst of my strategy considerations, I come across a tile that would look simple Nice in a spot that doesn’t get me a lot of points and I can’t resist knocking it down. The areas will grow naturally as I track points, but then I get taken in by the aesthetic and start shaping them the way I want, whether creating a small hamlet by a lake or a railway line through a scenic forest , damn it, dots. You can min-max everything and play on the RNG, or you can just build a beautiful landscape and then sit back and watch the smoke rise from the houses, the train chug along its little tracks, or the boats navigate your canals . Once I saw a deer!
The whole time you’re doing this, everything from the sound to the music to the art design is just incredibly relaxing. There’s even the most satisfying “pop” sound in the world every time you drop a tile, so good it’s almost tactile, going back to that whole board game feel.
If everything I wrote above didn’t draw enough picture, here is the game’s launch trailer:
The game is available from a number of PC stores, with links to each in the description of the launch trailer.