Hello! With Dorfromantik landing on Switch today, here's a piece from Jay that takes a closer look at landscapes. If you're interested in the Switch port itself, we're running a piece on Saturday.
I can’t ever get my Dorfromantik dioramas to look quite right. Other people seem to be able to make their rural idylls look balanced, organised. Villages and farms are rounded while rivers gently meander. For me, it’s the other way around. Rivers stagnate in huge lakes while houses and fields snake across the landscape in jagged lines.
It chafes particularly because we’re all familiar with the kind of bucolic landscape that Dorfromantik tasks you with making. By placing hexagonal puzzle pieces so that the edges line up – tree to tree, field to field, home to home – you build out these landscapes, and score points for keeping the jigsaw aligned. Every so often a tile will come with a quest, like turning it into a farm with 50 fields, and completing these gives you more tiles. You can play until you run out.