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Townscaper, the toy-like town builder, is launching in August

Townscaper, the toy-like town builder, is launching in August
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Raw Fury’s Townscaper will be releasing on PC and Switch this August, but mobile players may have to wait a little longer to get their hands on this cute city builder from the creator of Bad North.

Townscaper isn’t so much a game as it is a stress-free tool to create gorgeous towns with a distinct European vibe.

It’s not too much like actual city management games where you need to maintain a budget and meet the needs of a population, but is instead a way to create these quaint small island towns with curvy streets and tall towers. You can use it to build small hamlets, soaring cathedrals, canal networks, or even sky cities on stilts.

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This done by simply tapping, block by block, on where you want to place a building or street. You can change the colours of the buildings from a palette on the side, and pop down these coloured blocks on an irregular grid.

Townscaper’s underlying algorithm does the rest of the work, turning those blocks into cute houses, archways, stairs, bridges and lush backyards depending on where they’re placed adjacent to other blocks. I’ve played this quite a bit in Early Access and can confirm it does this extremely well.

Other than that, there’s no concrete goal to it, unless you count hitting the limits of your imagination as a goal.

Townscaper began as an experimental passion project by Oskar Stålberg, a game developer who previously worked on Bad North, another title published by Raw Fury. Stålberg used to post gifs of it to their Twitter account where it received lots of attention from fans as the project grew in scope.

Townscaper will be launching sometime in August according to the new trailer for it. It’s currently only supposed to be coming to PC and Switch at that point, but the mobile version should be coming at some point before the end of the year.

If you enjoy playing city builders on your phone, check out some of our favourites.
Olly Smith
Olly Smith
With a keen eye for hidden gems and long-forgotten retro titles, Olly is a games journalist who works hard to progress twenty minutes without a checkpoint only to fail on the home stretch.