Unpacking was one of my favorite games of 2021. I’m not terribly good at puzzle games, nor ‘relaxing’ games that don’t demand much from the player. But something about Unpacking was viscerally satisfying, more chill than undemanding. But there aren’t a lot of games that scratch that particular itch. Newly released indie puzzle game Dorfromantik is one of them.
There’s no real narrative here. Instead, you have a blank canvas and a minimal UI. On the bottom right hand corner of the screen, you have a series of hexagonal tiles, only two of which are visible at any given time. Your job is just… to lay those tiles down. Every tile has to be connected to another tile; you can’t just place them wherever. You get extra points for matching tile edges — if there are trees on the edge of both tiles, you’ll get more points.
As you go, you’ll find ‘quests’ popping up. Can you create a village with exactly 25 houses? A forest with more than 300 trees? Completing these quests will not just give you points, but they’ll place more tiles at the bottom of your stack, prolonging the game. If you ignore quests, you’ll get to make a small, cute map. But if you are dedicated in trying to complete those quests, you can make gargantuan, sprawling maps, with multiples towns and fields and forests.
Dorfromantik is a simple game, but part of the pleasure is how beautifully executed it is. From a distance, you can get a feeling for the scale of the work. The game at a distance presents a lovely pastoral landscape. But zoom in, and you see a lovely, gently cartoony style. There’s a warmth to Dorfromantik‘s art that is matched by its subtle, relaxing audio. As with Unpacking, there’s a satisfying click to placing a tile in the right place, particularly if you manage to get all sides of the tiles to match.
One thing I think Dorfromantik does well is changing the aesthetics of the maps. I can’t quite figure out what the rationale of it is, but I’ve seen maps that are lush and green, as well as maps that have more orange and brown fall colors. I’d love to see the game do more of this. Loop Hero, a big indie hit from 2021, isn’t a game I particularly love, but one of its best features was the interactivity between the tiles you lay down. As you build the map, the tiles interact. Place a river next to a road, and you get a marsh. Place enough hills in a row, and they transform into a mountain.
Dorfromantik currently lacks that. While the game lets players create gorgeous vistas, there’s no sense of surprise or discovery to the game. Even the game’s ‘hidden’ tiles, secret tiles at the edge of the map that challenge players to create gargantuan rivers or massive sweeping forests, don’t bring any particularly new aesthetics or challenges. Part of what I love about games as an interactive medium is the sense of discovery they allow. Dorfromantik is, if anything, too chill; that sense of discovery is lacking.
Despite that, however, Dorfromantik is a delight. While I hope the game grows and adds a little more mystique, I also enjoy that I can fire it up and play for an hour and just have a fun, satisfying session. The game is relaxing, beautiful, and easy to jump into. The cottagecore movement has found its ideal game.