It’s time to open the eleventh door of the RPS Advent Calendar, but what is this? Missing a small hexagonal brick? Well, do I have something for you.
Its Dorfromantik!
Katharine: Dorfromantik is one of the best surprises of 2021 for me. I’ve sunk more hours into this relaxing pastoral puzzle game than any other I’ve played this year – and that includes the two big Ace Attorney games combined. It was also released into early access at the perfect time of year. It’s the end of March, the UK is still grumbling with yet another grim lockdown, and giving life and shape to tiny towns, forests and golden fields through an assortment of Random hexagonal tiles are like the perfect antidote to the chaos that follows outside.
As I told the supporters of RPS the begin of the year, the core concept of Dorfromantik is amazingly simple. Each round starts with a single tile and then you have complete freedom to decide how to use your remaining stacks to build your small country town landscape. The more faces of a tile you match with the surrounding faces, the more points you get. There is also no time limit and the game continues until you run out of tiles.
The secret to prolonging your Dorf sessions is completing its various quests – the tiles sometimes say things like, “Hey! I want you to build a town with at least 34 houses in it” or, “I’m that field comfortable with only 6 other fields beside me and NO MORE, thank you very much.” Combined with your pursuit of ever higher scores, these quests gives Dorfromantik a welcome sense of structure and purpose compared to other free-form puzzle builders (Townscaper, I’m looking at you), and the loop gently rotates and snaps the cute, colorful bricks into place (not to mention its equally soothing soundtrack) is exactly what keeps me coming back again and again. .
I also like its interface. Aside from the bright and sunny color palette, it’s the little details that make Dorfromantik so famous. The way smoke comes out of the small chimneys of some houses. Its wooden windmills were strangely hidden. The chugging toy boats can traverse its lakes and rivers. Even the sound of trains running along its completely meaningless railway lines makes me laugh out loud and that’s before we get to the sounds of the surrounding wildlife and the animals gradually inhabit the forest and its forests. Speaking of animals, it’s also the perfect game for those times when my cat decides to lie on his stomach on my stomach and stare deep into my eyes demanding a chin scratch, as everything can be controlled by turning and rolling the baby. Roll your mouse. Add a steaming hot cup of tea to the mix to sip while mulling over which will lay my next brick and ahhh, happiness.
Dorfromantik also only gets better with age, although there are still a few months left before a full and final release. While the ‘classic’ highscore mode it launches has lost a bit of quirky mystery due to various quality of life updates and clearer instructions, it’s still as compelling as ever, especially now that the developers Toukana Interactive have added even more unlockable tiles and an extra biome to the mix. Plus, the creative mode that came out in the summer finally allows me to create picturesque little canvases instead of always chasing those perfect tile placements. It’s been an impressive debut for the four game design students, and I can’t wait to see what they can do with it in 2022 with mysterious new game modes, seeds and custom rule sets, and community challenges. If you haven’t been to Dorf yet, I can think of no better Christmas game to get away with for hours.
