Hello! With Dorfromantik landing on Switch today, here’s a piece from Jay that takes a closer look at landscapes. If you’re interested in the Switch port itself, we’re running a piece on Saturday.
I can’t ever get my Dorfromantik dioramas to look quite right. Other people seem to be able to make their rural idylls look balanced, organised. Villages and farms are rounded while rivers gently meander. For me, it’s the other way around. Rivers stagnate in huge lakes while houses and fields snake across the landscape in jagged lines.
It chafes particularly because we’re all familiar with the kind of bucolic landscape that Dorfromantik tasks you with making. By placing hexagonal puzzle pieces so that the edges line up – tree to tree, field to field, home to home – you build out these landscapes, and score points for keeping the jigsaw aligned. Every so often a tile will come with a quest, like turning it into a farm with 50 fields, and completing these gives you more tiles. You can play until you run out.
The whole game plays with a top-down view, presenting the land as both puzzle and art piece. Its beauty is an important part of its design, and one that’s clearly been carefully considered by the developers. Forests, villages, and little steam trains on rickety railways are in. Parks, cities, and roads are out. The only progression in the game is additional tile and overview aesthetics for completing certain challenges across multiple play sessions. Wheat fields might become lavender; deer appear in forests; towns become speckled with tiny pumpkins. But fundamentally, the basics of Dorfromantik’s presentation of landscape are unchangeable.