Review: Dorfromantik (Early Access)

It’s time to immerse yourself in a little peaceful world. Take a break from reality and create a charming little world.

The aim of the game is simply to keep building out your world by placing the randomly generated tiles until you run out. Each game starts with a single starter tile and a stack of randomly generated tiles, there’s no knowing what will appear in your stack, so you’ve got to try and be a little tactical about where and how you’re building out your world. Although note that you can usually see three tiles down your deck which can be handy at times.

The tiles have a whole host of different combinations including forests, villages and waterways. You’ll unlock tiles from completing challenges throughout your time playing the game such as combining so many of the same type of tile together. Don’t worry though, this game isn’t complicated to play in fact you can play the whole game just using your mouse which makes it easy to pick up. Plus, it’s only if you’re feeling competitive that you need to worry about completing the challenges, I found myself a few times just making a lovely little world.

Speaking of the challenge these come in the form of tasks throughout your play session. When you place certain tiles, they’ll have a banner above them, some will have a defined number for example six and you’ll have to join six of that type-together. What’s great about the way the tasks are shown is that if you hover over them, they’ll show you where is accessible to play a tile to continue. This is a really great feature when it comes to the flag challenges as for these you’ll want to close off and complete the tile type it’s on. Be careful to check your surrounding tiles though as I tripped myself up a few times by not checking a tile or two over and making it tough to expand my current route. Competing each of these tasks rewards you with bonus tiles added to your stack so the only way to keep going, expanding out your beautiful landscapes and gaining those high schools is by taking on the challenge.

The wonderful little hand-drawn art style makes this game really inviting together with the animation of birds flying by, the boats and trains going up and down it’s got a lot to offer yet keeps it all feeling scenic and relaxing.

This game is highly replayable as you never know what the tiles have in store for you and with the building being endless each session will last as long as you can keep completing those tasks.

In terms of future content, this game just launched into early access and the team are already hard at work on new biomes, more unlockable tiles (some with special behaviour) and more options to collection points as you’re playing.

if you’re looking for even more of a challenge Whilst you wait for those upcoming updates, the game already offers over 40 steam achievements to attempt to unlock. You’ll easily find yourself losing track of time starting from a little session of 20mins or so can soon turn into a few hours as you get immersed in the game and challenge yourself to create the best little world around.

Dorfromantik

Platforms: Steam (Available Now)

Price: £6.79

Developer: Toukana Interactive

Publisher: Toukana Interactive

Rating: PEGI 16

I received 'Dorfromantik' for free, to play and review thanks to the team at Toukana Interactive who kindly gifted a Steam copy of the game.