Feel good games are a staple in the community, they ranged from a plethora of different Nintendo Games such as Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to Luigi’s Mansion. However, rarely do games come out where you can actually kick back, put your feet up and just enjoy an atmospheric journey. Dorfromantik is a small, yet beautiful strategy and puzzle game that revolves around creating a small and ever-evolving village by placing tiles.
The more you play through the game, the more you will unlock and learn about its world and its quests which will give you more types of tiles as you continue to build your world full of life.
How to Download Dorfromantik
You can download Dorfromantik from Steam. To begin, click on the Download button at the end of the review.
The Game Review
Story and Setting
Honestly, the setting at first glance feels like a beautiful renaissance era with a terrific art style by developers Toukana Interactive. However, the more you get into the game with the more kind of tiles being unlocked, you get more and more kinds of biomes and structures which resemble medieval-era buildings and architecture as well as some really good forests, rivers and lakes and even rail roads which are a Victorian thing in tile form!
Gameplay and Design
To start off, this game is NOT a city builder, but rather a well-devised puzzle game. This isn’t Sim City or Cities Skylines and it really doesn’t need to be those things. This game was created by a small group of German game designing students and they did an amazing job at it. The game is a mix of relaxation, atmosphere, fun, and a surprising amount of challenge.
So, since you do build a city or technically a village in this game, how is it not a city builder you ask? The easy answer for that is the piece system.
You’ve got hexagonal puzzle pieces that can be placed literally anywhere, and they have randomly generated structures and builds on them so you technically don’t build anything, just place them like puzzle pieces. The side types are as follows: Plains, Wheat Field, Houses, River/Lakes, and Railroads.
Your job is to just put the pieces together and fulfill the challenges the game throws at you, instead of actually designing your own city from scratch. The more time you spend combining pieces, the larger your village goes from being a village to a giant continent.
There’s no rush in the game, you can take as long as you want when it comes to putting puzzle pieces together and you can play the whole game as relaxed as you can while taking in the sights, and the pretty tunes in the background.
I’ll be honest, I’m addicted to Dorfromantik. You literally lose your sense of time while playing this game, it’s impressive but I actually think that playing this game in short spans of time is better. However, that is its indictment of how good this game is on its own, and the amount of leisure you feel while playing this game that you basically lose track of time and space itself.
Verdict
In conclusion, Dorfromantik is fun, relaxing, and very pretty to look at. It doesn’t set out to do more than it lets you do in the game itself, and that is a good thing. In an age of over-promise and under-deliver, most games manage to become plagued by this system of creating hype so much that no matter what they do they will remain underwhelming.
Dorfromantik is a breath of fresh air in a saturated genre that never lets experimentation become a key part of it, with unique art styles and brand new gameplay mechanics, it sets itself apart from the crowd.
