Good all by itself, but with a cold glass of wine and a tiny bit of weed this thing is INCREDIBLY relaxing. really a magical little thing.

Finally, a city-building game that doesn’t try to bite off more than it can chew?

Town to City is one of the most competent and focused games on the market. It’s not management-heavy, nor is it micro-focused. Instead, it wants you to create a beautiful city with a defined way forward, while also creating pockets of emergent ways to express yourself. (I'll elaborate later.)

A common plague among many city-building games I’ve played is that they try to be everything a city-builder could possibly be at once: an economy sim, a city painter, a management sim, a road-building sim, and whatever else-sim. They compund many-many features and systems together into one giant "feature creep" bubble and expect them all to work, which they rarely do. (Look at Cities: Skylines II, for an example.)

But I think Town to City truly nailed the vision of what it wanted to be and executed it almost flawlessly. You may not be the target audience for this game, but I believe the systems at play here will find an audience among those who enjoy city painting with clearly defined incentives to progress further.

It’s not a game where you’ll find yourself asking, “What am I supposed to do now?”, a common issue I’ve had with many city painters. Town to City includes a quest system that closely interacts with the decoration aspect of the game. These quests encourage you to build things you might not have otherwise considered, and the points of interest you create add variety and stories to your city: a rock garden, a hedge maze, a cemetery, or a lonely house far from the town. Quests like these bring emergent, storytelling flavor to the systems at play.

And while the game may not be a most complex managment sim ever to be created, nor is it micro-hell like rimworld, I think there's joy in simply being able to paint your city with the game giving you creative prompts to spark your own creativity.

After Cities Skylines 2 crashed on me for maybe the 1000th time since launch, I decided to jump back into Town to City. What an absolutely gorgeous game - from gameplay, to graphics, to the characters, and ESPECIALLY the pets you can adopt. Decorating your town (to city) is a blast - so many options, so much choice, and a lot of freedom - with more to come with its upcoming update. I can't stop playing Town to City and I hope so SO much that they bring it to console one day. What an absolutely, ridiculously, beautifully cosy game. I could get lost in this for hours.