PlayStation 5 Just Added The Chillest City Building Strategy Game Of All Time

Making a functional city and a pretty one are often conflicting goals in strategy games and city builders. Getting your settlement to work as efficiently as it can usually means letting aesthetics fall by the wayside as you cram buildings together like Tetris blocks, linking them to optimize how they work together. That can be a bummer when you want to do well but also make a city that looks like a nice place to live, and now one strategy game that actually merges form and function perfectly is available on PlayStation 5.

Originally released on PC in 2022, Dorfromantik is an impressively simple game. Its rules are easy to internalize and there are no tricky controls to wrestle with, but out of that simplicity, it captures the joy of optimizing in a city builder, figuring out a tricky puzzle, and even sketching an idyllic landscape all at once.

You play Dorfromantik by just placing one hex tile at a time onto a map. Each tile has a different bit of landscape on it, like wheat fields, meadows, houses, water, and train tracks. Your main goal is to get the highest score you can, by placing tiles so that similar objects touch. Connected houses become towns, connected water tiles form lakes, train tracks join into larger routes, and so on. But you have a limited number of tiles to work with, and the only way to get more is by completing other objectives.

Sometimes, you’ll place a tile with a number hovering above it, which indicates how many matching tiles need to be connected. Some want you to pass a minimum threshold, while others demand an exact number. Either way, meeting their conditions grants more tiles and a big bonus to your score.

Like I said, simple stuff. The challenge comes from your ability to plan ahead and adjust to whatever random tile you draw next. Some tiles have more than one object, so deciding whether it’s more important to prioritize the houses or trees requires its own strategy. A completed railway might end up blocking what could have been a massive forest, while closing off a lake could prevent you from scoring points by building rivers off of it later. And while Dorfromantik gets significantly harder the more of these choices you have to make, it never feels stressful. Even when you’re just a few moves away from running out of tiles, the game’s remarkably chill atmosphere keeps the tone more in the realm of playing with blocks than struggling through a difficult puzzle.

The real genius of Dorfromantik is how its rules guide you toward making landscapes that aren’t just high-scoring, but also beautiful. A bustling town or sprawling wheat field is worth more points than a few connected tiles scattered across the map, so the incentive is to group as many together as possible. At the same time, the randomness of drawing tiles means you need to incorporate unexpected twists into anything you’re building. Figuring out the best way to route a train track through town or guide a winding river through a forest is key to getting your score up, and it also results in varied landscapes with all their different elements working together.

On top of its normal high-score mode, Dorfromantik also includes a creative mode that removes scores entirely, a more restrictive hard mode, and monthly challenges that have specific goals to achieve on a set map.

Dorfromantik is the perfect way to mix the joy of designing an aesthetically pleasing environment with the fun of chasing a high score in a strategy game. And since both of those goals are treated equally, it’s just as good whether you want to challenge yourself with a puzzle or just relax for a while in its serene landscape.

Dorfromantik is available now on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC.