Townscaper
By Chad Sapieha,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Freeform town-building toy is a creative joy.
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Townscaper
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What’s It About?
TOWNSCAPER is less of a game and more of a world design tool made so simple that even young kids can use it. Upon startup, you'll find yourself looking at an empty space. No instructions are provided. But if you move the cursor and click, you'll create a little bridge tile on the water. Move the cursor beside the first, click again, and you'll create another. If you move the cursor on top of an existing bridge tile, you'll build a little house above it. Try creating a few houses side by side and they'll join to form a larger house. There are no characters or plotlines, and you're provided no objectives. Players just keep adding (or subtracting, by right clicking) tiles to their little island town until it's as wide and tall, intricate or Spartan, organized or chaotic as they like. You can change the hues of the houses you add by clicking on the color palette on the side, and you can zoom and move the camera in three dimensions to get a better view of what you're making. The settings menu lets you adjust a handful of parameters, such as where the sun is in the sky, which season it is, and whether you'd like to see a grid overlay while building. But that's all there is to it. It's just an exceptionally accessible virtual world building toy. When you've finished building the ocean village of your dreams, you can take a screenshot to share with friends.
Is It Any Good?
It's hard not to get sucked into the freeform fun of this little virtual toy for at least a little while. Townscaper makes no attempt to hide the fact that it's not really a game, but rather a means to exercise our imagination. Its sole purpose is to provide players a remarkably simple and intuitive platform for building island towns. It's the sort of thing kids of almost any age can get into and have fun with, simply mousing about and clicking randomly to see what happens. Your first sea villages are bound to be a little muddled and bizarre, like something out of a Studio Ghibli fever dream. But with just a little bit of experimenting and practice, kids can start building wonderfully fantastical towns that sprawl across the ocean, reach high into the sky, and connect in all sorts of fun, seemingly physics-defying ways.
Some players are bound to wish for more -- more variety of structures, or more control over just how they can place each tile. But there's a bit of genius in the limitations that have been imposed. It keeps the experience delightfully accessible while forcing more ambitious players to come up with creative ways to make the town they've pictured in their minds. And remember that this is a very inexpensive game -- just five bucks. It's not meant to compete with games that have epic stories and endless potential, but rather to do just one thing and do it well. Townscaper is a fun little digital toy that can help kids of almost any age express their creativity, and maybe capture a picture or two along the way so they can share and remember what they've made.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about screen time. There's not really an end to anything you do in Townscaper, and you can just keep building forever, so how do you decide when you've spent enough time playing?
How do you feel when you make things without instruction or direction? Do you enjoy making things in virtual spaces as much as in the real world?
Game Details
- Platforms: Mac , Nintendo Switch , Windows
- Pricing structure: Paid
- Available online?: Available online
- Publisher: Raw Fury
- Release date: August 26, 2021
- Genre: Simulation
- ESRB rating: E for No Descriptors
- Last updated: September 1, 2021
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