This casual game called ‘Dorfromantik’ is finally finished. With its 1.0 update dropping this past week, it’s a game that you can find deeply joyous and calming at the same time. In here, one will let you you put down little hexagonal tiles with slices of countryside to try and fulfill cute objectives, which give you more tiles to make a larger haul of fields and villages until you run out of tiles.
The German word “dorfromantik” can be literally translated as “village romanticization.”
The developers of Dorfromantik said the word was “usually used to describe the kind of nostalgic feeling you get when you long to be in the countryside.” Well, they said that Dorfromantik is a state of mind.
There’s no resource production or cost to think about — no competition, no population, no politics, no win, no lose. You are scored purely on how well your tiles match up. Your only goals are harmony and beauty.
If you’re looking for a game that will calm your mind and relax for a day, you just found the perfect game.
You could even say it is all about aesthetics and cleansing. The landscapes, drawn in loose strokes and lazy splashes of pastel color, and animated with puffing steam engines, tugboats, and wheeling sea birds, are gorgeous and toy like.
It’s just a nice place to be, where your imaginations could run. Time doesn’t pass here, and nobody needs anything from you. Nothing is counting down while you consider placing your next tile; take as long as you like. The game plays just as well in five minutes between work sprints as it does across a zoned-in, blissed-out three hours.
The sounds are even more aesthetically-pleasing more than you thought. The whole time you’re doing that, everything from the sound to the music to the art design, is just incredibly relaxing. There’s even the world’s most satisfying “pop” sound every time you drop a tile down, which is so good it’s almost tactile, again harking back to that whole board game feel.
The biggest challenges, initially, seem to be posed by the rail and river tiles, which can only be placed next to others of their kind or adjacent to specific terminal points. These can easily create blockages to the expansion of your map as you wait for the “ideal” tile to turn up in the stack.
‘Dorfromantik’ is a city-building puzzle video game developed and published by four German students, Luca Langenberg, Sandro Heuberger, Zwi Zausch, and Timo Falcke. These four founded an independent studio named Toukana Interactive to work on the game.
The game’s art style was influenced by both landscape paintings and photography.
