izigame.me

If you’re looking for a simple game that takes minimal effort to play, yet fully engages you, then Dorfromantik is a fine choice. I purchased this game at the start of a much needed break. At that point, my mind was too foggy to do almost anything else, so I stuck to playing this game before bedtime. Put on some mildly stimulating sounds in the background, and you’ve got an excellent activity to help you recover from severe fatigue.
The gameplay is extremely simple, yet there’s just enough mechanics to keep you making meaningful choices at every turn. If you want a high score, it’s essential that you balance quest progression and perfect fits. Whilst getting perfect fits is very satisfying, especially when it’s multiple instances at once, you’ll hamstring your play-through by aiming for perfection. It is, indeed, common to make concessions, which isn’t particularly satisfying, but doing so does not lead to ugly seams in your features. Creating a pretty world is, of course, half the fun. In this regard, I think the game does a good job early on, though the larger the map grows, the noisier everything becomes. You don’t get many tiles that comprise of just one feature, so woods, fields and villages tend to look stringy instead of blobby, which I’m not a fan of. Rail- and waterways should be placed with care, because their ends don’t accept anything but more rails and water respectively. This means that time and time again, I end up building nonsensical, webby rail and river networks because it’s safe and effective to do so, though it never looks good. Why do some quests require you to close rivers anyway? Where’s the water going and coming from? In terms of progression, there’s various one-tile features to unlock, as well as different biomes which change how parts of the map look. I like having focal points in my world, but the fact that special features are just one tile makes them pretty insignificant on a larger map. Furthermore, you don’t get that many unique ones, because you mostly unlock skins for existing ones instead, which I struggle to differentiate in many cases. Lastly, growing your map ever more provides a good challenge, but when you’re doing especially well, it can take over 10 hours to run out of tiles, which is way too long for a game you might only play every now and again. The pace gets progressively worse as well, because instead of completing quests at a steady rate, you’ll be working on several similarly large ones simultaneously, which can take a very long time to finish.
Dorfromantik costs quite a lot for what you get, but if you’re in need of something to occupy your mind while everything else is too much effort, this game should give you sufficient value in return. See if you can spot the pumpkin with the c: face.