I spend most of my day creating worlds. Whether that’s in my day job or the hours I spend as an author, creating worlds is how I spend my time. You would think, then, that when I take time for myself, it would be doing something that doesn’t require the creation of yet another world, yet another place to fill with inhabitants and watch grow from a kernel to a grand world.

Yet here we are. Another city builder. Another world builder. And I am as delighted as ever.

We start with a single tiny hex...

Dorfromantik is a combination cosy puzzle game and city builder. Players build a landscape consisting of a variety of landscape types through drawing and placing tiles on the map. Ideally, the landscapes on these tiles align with their neighbouring landscapes - forests touching forests, towns touching towns, etc. - though, due to the limited number of tiles and the existence of quests, there are incentives not to place tiles perfectly. Perfectly placed tiles, after all, yield more points, but fulfilling quests adds more tiles to the tile pile, creating a delicate balance between perfect placements, strategic tile placement, and aesthetic world design.

Because, to be clear, Dorfromantik is very much centred on aesthetics.

This is not a perfect tile, but also, yes it is.

Dorfromantik is very much a cosy city-builder. There is no time pressure, no imminent events, nothing that gets the heart racing beyond the diminishing pile of tiles (which, with good gameplay, refresh themselves with a satisfying regularity). Paired with this lack of pressure, though, is a soundtrack of calming little notes, adding a soft feeling to everything you do. The only sharp noise in the game is the chime of a perfect tile scoring. Tiles land with little pops, there are occasional rooster noises and bird song, but beyond that, there is nothing but the player and the soft music, serenading their careful world-crafting.

The visual design matches the music, with the map expanding into variously themed biomes, giving the world a sense of scale and each area its own feel, even while being clearly part of the same world. Rivers wend through cherry blossoms, spooky jack-o-lantern towns, and winter paradises before meandering their way out to the coast. Trains weave through endless forests, speckled here and there with cottages. Clocktowers and fountains dot the larger towns while the lights fade on and off in the small ones.

It’s just…satisfying.

These fields live in the sunrise.

There are other cosy puzzle citybuilders that are mechanically better than Dorfromantik. Islanders, for example, does a better job of giving creative freedom, while 20 Minute Metropolis includes extra mechanics to make the game more of a puzzle. There is no game that hits the spot quite like Dorfromantik, though. When I load it up, I know I’m loading up a cosy hour or two. I know that, for that time, there will be me, and there will be the world, and there will be nothing else. It’s an excellent way to destress and leave the real world behind. It is quintessentially cosy, and it is a quiet delight every time I play it.

Developer: Toukana Interactive
Genre: City Builder, Puzzle
Year: 2022
Country: Germany
Language: English
Time to complete: 1-2 hours/session
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/310fwmo2CAs