1y ago

Slow Down With These Serene City-Building Games

From 'Islanders' to 'Townscaper,' a handful of titles are designed to soothe your frazzled brain with minimalist, puzzle-like calm.

I am looking for more games like this: though this list seems like a good starting point.

Anybody have any recommendations or experiences with city builders (the less-stressful variety, not like Frostpunk or something haha)

Thanks!

42 comments

Not like the games in the list, but Foundation Steam Link is one of my favourites and meets your criteria for being a chill one :)

Kingdoms and Castles would fit here. It's been getting slow but steady updates for years.
- Ohhh thank you for this. Mildly reminds me of the Stronghold games which I used to love.

I'd recommend timberborn, but the intense droughts can be pretty stressful if you're not careful. But you can totally turn down the difficulty to make them much less severe
- Nothing like relaxing with my beavers after a stressful day.
- I tried the new update (experimental)... The blood red rivers make it interesting
  
  I'd say tedious, changing flood gate settings every time one appears is too much busy work. I turned them off, much more relaxing

If you like minimalism Mini-Metro is great
Note: it will be stressfull in the end, still relaxing if you accept that will end after a while.

Islanders is only a few bucks and very serene. You get a random island and a small palette of buildings at a time. The buildings can only go certain places (farm on a plain, quarry near stone, hunting lodge near forest). You get points for putting certain buildings together, or certain ones further apart (mostly in ways that make sense). And that's about it. When you use up the buildings on your palette you get a new set. There's no timer, just try to get points. When you reach the goal you can start over on a new island.
It's very simple. You can't move or demolish buildings, you don't worry about roads or infrastructure of any kind, there's no citizen happiness or disasters or money or anything. Just relax and place little buildings on islands.

"Project Highrise" is another nice calm relaxing game, although in the other dimension to most city builders

Slipways is a great turn-based scifi empire builder that focuses on colonizing planets and building trade routes (titular slipways) between them to synergize. It has chill soundtrack, pretty visuals, and no war to stress about, your only worry is optimizing your empire layout
- Ooh, thats sounds right up my alley. Used to love civilization and stellaris and those types of games, but war was always my least favorite part of the gameplay. It gets in the way of my perfect empire.
- Slipways is pretty awesome. Easy to learn, hard to master.

This past year I've really enjoyed The Wandering Village and Airborne Kingdom. Both are slower paced with a very unique aesthetic

Wasting away hours with Ostriv. Alpha/ea or not. It's not stressing at all, in default even very slow and can be paused. Goes great with an audio book 👌
Alas activity slowed down a lot recently. Which is not very surprising considering the dev lives in a freakin warzone :-/

I've seen Thronefall recently and it looked really cool, but it also apparently has just a few hours of content. You might enjoy it as a chill experience tho

There is Godus which I always thought of as a precursor to islanders. It has more elements to interrupt the player but it has the sake overall aesthetic and feel.
Edit:
I played this ages ago and the reviews after some updates are very negative so it sounds like it's no longer the game I played.

42 comments