Townscaper is a relaxing city-builder

Townscaper is a charming and beautiful toy by Oskar Stlberg (previously at BB), available now for Windows and MacOS. It approaches the city-builing genre, but subtracts all the things that make such games distressing and frustrating, leaving you to create the waterside town of your dreams without worrying about resources, enemies, natural disasters or other limitations.

Yet I don't want to trivialize it as less than a game, because it has such a wealth of creative possibility and polish, all aided by the author's marvelous sense of design and the world's inexorable and elegant detailing of the player's every crude click. It has the same lego-set pleasure of Minecraft's creative mode, but everything you do is perfected automatically with a pop—so long as you're content building Scandinavian Mont-Saint-Michels that would be utterly indefensible in Bad North.

@OskSta #Townscaper This is my little town. pic.twitter.com/QedxFRPVTG

— Creekky (@CreekkyT) July 1, 2020

On the sea is implied a gently-warped grid. Clicking once raises blocks of land from the water, which first form paved quaysides but might turn into bridges, courtyards or gardens depending on context. Click again on the same spot, and a house appears. Make the house taller by clicking up, or wider by clicking in adjacent places. Obliterate work with a right-click, and struts and pillars appear to support what remains above. You can pick different colors, whirl the scene around, zoom up close, and that's more or less it.

@OskSta you are a blessing - thank you for this wonderful gift.