Townscaper (Switch eShop) Review | Nintendo Life


They say that only the boring ones get bored. In the past, you would have been lucky enough to have a wooden stick to play with, unless it was sunny, in which case you might as well have shade. The children of these days with their mobile phones … where is the imagination? Is here! In Townscaper, a game that publisher Raw Fury himself says “has no real gameplay”, and that it will give you exactly as much fun as you are prepared to play.

Upon launching Townscaper, you will be greeted with an unlimited, blank expanse of water. A list of color swatches hangs on the left of the screen and has a cursor that you move with the left stick, but you are not prompted to do anything. After an hour or two of our tests, curiosity got the best of us and we hit ‘A’. Well! Now things were getting interesting. With a plop, a small cube appeared in the water. It was a stone construction, a small wall by the sea with a railing on top. It was like something out of a storybook and we imagined the ripped rosy cheeks joking around and the seagulls stealing their fries.

And that’s what this game does: Townscaper will take the simplest of disposable tickets and interpret it as a clever instruction to draw a charming little town scene. It is like a waiter congratulating you on your choice of the menu, as if the gastronomic talent fell on you and not on the chef.

In fact, we did our best to do something ugly and pointless, but Townscaper wouldn’t accept it. Flicking the stick around and pounding the ‘A’ blindly, then flicking a finger disdainfully across the screen only made them overjoyed. plop-plop-plops. When we opened our eyes, we had a square with a canal running through it, a dock with a small bench and a binocular, a row of pink cabins by the sea with flowerpots on their doors, and a crazy tower on stilts that looked like a good-natured wizard lived at.

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Then we try ‘B’. Unlock your cubes from existence, which, of course, sparked the demolition urge. But this magic toy is resistant to destruction. Just as cutting a nasty worm in half leaves two nasty worms, cutting a lovely little waterside village in half left us with only two lovely little waterside villages. Eliminating parts of the city becomes a good way to create. Line up an attractive screenshot, use the lovely lighting controls to create a poetic sunset, let’s say cheese, and… hmm… that tower is ruining the backdrop. Sorry, wizard. It’s like pruning a hedge, but with undo.

With save and load for different cities and some graphics options to manage performance if you’re going more ‘metropolis’ than ‘dead end’, Townscaper is a very friendly little package. It can be tricky to move your eyes at times, but it’s hard to worry about anything when you play this.

Oskar Stålberg has created a charming and attractive toy for imaginative play. Anyone willing to project themselves into their worlds and tell stories to themselves as they build will have a blast (although young children may need help with the controls). Raw Fury claims to care about “experiences and emotions”, not “genres or mechanics”. If that’s where your priorities are too, then give Townscaper a shot.




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