Hello there, fans of city-builders and/or idyllic 19th-century Mediterranean getaways! You two very specific groups of people need to know that I spent the entire weekend playing Town To City and did little else, because I couldn't stop playing Town To City.
It's a game that shows the people of its world, much like our own, tired of the brutalities of modern industrial life and yearning for greener pastures. So it puts you in charge of those pastures, a town where a steady stream of treechangers arrive at a train station seeking a new life, and it's your job to first build them a house, and then put them to work.
Zooming out to survey everything you're able and asked to do in this game, Town To City looks like a city-builder. People's homes and jobs create numbers which then impact other stuff, there is happiness to worry about, warehouses to distribute resources to and from and shopfronts which draw on a complicated supply network of farms and granaries that you're given full control over. If your idea of city-building is to get lost in the numbers, managing a settlement's nerve centre and making sure its connections and creations all intertwine and sing in harmony, Town To City absolutely lets you play like that.
Zoom in, though, and there are huge sections of Town To City where you're not really city-building at all, and everything feels closer to Tiny Glade or Townscaper than SimCity. Through a combination of the game's flexible voxel graphics and a creation suite more interested in painting than laying along grids, Town To City lets you spend countless hours just...being creative. I lost track of the amount of time I spent making little bendy roads up hillsides, planting little hedge parks in between houses, putting flowerpots on people's balconies and planting flags where needed, not because it was important (though it can be, because your inhabitants’ happiness is linked to the aesthetics of their neighbourhood), but just because I thought it looked nice.
What makes the game so good is the way both these halves politely respect each other's contributions and boundaries. If four families arrive in town at once and need somewhere to live, you obviously need to build them a house, but if you want to spend an hour designing the perfect cul de sac for them all first, planting every decorative shrub in their yards and agonising over the placement of every single lamp adorning their walls, you can do that. They won't complain, or get cold, or starve, or leave; they'll just patiently wait for you to be done, then you can move them in.
Unpopular shops won't lead to crime, unhappy people don't riot, empty houses don't rot or catch fire. You're basically never hassled. This isn't the real world, these aren't real people, the game knows these are dolls with some needs. You're here to build a dollhouse, and if it takes you three hours to get a family out of the cold and into a farmhouse then they're not only cool with it, they'll appreciate your effort once you do.
For me, this is everything that's good about city-builders (a sandbox, a plaything, a set of numbers to mess around with) and nothing I hate about them (the stress of having bad things happen to you or the things you make). It creates a frictionless experience; you're always building but never having to rework (unless you want to!), always expanding but never circling back because you made a logistical mistake.
The game's dual focus--the grander designs of your town at one end of the zoom lens, the Sims-like attention to each individual household at the other--made me prouder of my towns than I think I've ever been of any town or city, in any game, ever. I had made all of it. From the widest boulevard outside a towering cathedral to the placement of each park bench and individual flowerpot.
For a game with such a chill vibe, I felt strangely all-powerful, more godlike than I'd felt playing games where I'd been a literal god. Though not in a cackling, vengeful god way; just a warm, glowing, benevolent way, like I was putting in six days of work before I could rest on the seventh and watch everyone go buy some eggs and play hopscotch.
Does all this cosiness and coddling rob the game of any sense of peril? Of course it does. If you're into games like Frostpunk because you like the feeling of playing a video game with a gun to your head, you might hate Town To City. It's more polite than Canadians lining up at a line shop, and I suppose there's an argument that at some level a city-builder requires some element of threat, otherwise it just becomes a game about building stuff.
But that's exactly what I love about Town To City. It gives me the systems of a city-builder but the elegance of a town-painter, the challenge of juggling morale but letting you cheese your way to improving it by drowning your residents in dogs and fancy clothing stores. It's given me everything I love from this genre and tossed out everything I don't, then played some wonderfully soothing accordion music over the top, just for good measure.
Town To City is out in Early Access on Steam.
