Cities are a collection of spaces, and nowhere is that principle more obvious than in Townscaper, with its organic labyrinths of walls and streets emerging from nothingness. A cottage here, a lighthouse there-a balance between form and emptiness. Create works of art with buildings as your medium. You’ll need to find your own fun with Townscaper, but then isn’t that true of most builders? Yes, it’s unsettling at first when presented with what’s essentially a blank canvas, but therein lies the thrill as well. Does that make Townscaper better? Maybe not-but it certainly makes it interesting. It forces you to adapt, to create a town that feels bound by real-world constraints more than anything I’ve ever built in Cities: Skylines. You can’t force certain buildings to behave the way you want, and you can’t lay down a perfectly straight road. There’s an argument to be made that part of Townscaper’s charm is how much is outside your control. Each new layer, each new mechanic, makes it more a “game” in the traditional sense and less a curiosity. I’d love to swap architectural styles, to make post-war brutalist blocks or San Francisco Victorians or even just asphalt streets.īut there’s also a part of me that thinks Townscaper is perfect as-is. I’d love to see people wandering the streets, or even light traffic puttering along. There are a lot of directions Townscaper could go in Early Access. Build a castle, or an old medieval town like Stockholm’s Gamla Stan, or a small New England fishing village. But those two interactions (and a dozen or so building colors) allow for near-infinite possibilities.
Townscaper is magnificent because it’s truly a two-button game: Left Click and you add a structure, Right Click and you remove it.
Pick colors from the palette, plop down colored blocks of house on the irregular grid, and watch Townscaper's underlying algorithm automatically turn those blocks into cute little houses, arches, stairways, bridges and lush backyards, depending on their configuration. If you build over an empty “street,” you get an archway. Townscaper is an experimental passion project.
#TOWNSCAPER PLAY PATCH#
If you enclose a plot of land, a la Parisian courtyards? The cobblestones disappear and you’re left with a small patch of grass. There are so many edge-cases to discover, and I’m still finding new ones the longer I play. Add another structure adjacent to the first, you get a split-level home.Īnd so on, and so forth. Click again, you get a one-story home on that plot of land. Wherever you click, you get one plot of land.
The magic of Townscaper is that it’s all procedural.