I play video games. A lot. What, fifteen years now, every Tuesday night, some friends of mine and I, hop on line, strap into the most recent first-person shooter on the market (Destiny, Apex Legends, but mainly Call of Duty of late) and dispense with so much ordinance, we’d have to take out a loan every week if it were the real world. Yes. I know I’m too old for this. I’m blaming our culture, and the general zeitgeist of the day. Deal with it. Or, you can start paying for me to going to counseling, where I will talk to the nice lady behind the desk, with the clipboard, who snoozes through my diatribes each week while pretending to scribble notes on a clipboard. I game.
But today, I wanted to tell you about a video game called Townscaper. Townscaper is available on Steam – and costs like $5 or something. It is wicked simple. It’s not minecraft or anything. It’s just a little demo of a game created by Oskar Stålberg and it doesn’t have any game mechanics to it besides allowing you to add up building shapes of various colors, then take photos of said structures. No, there isn’t anything else to it. No, I’m not sick in the head. Yes, I still think you ought to spend five bucks of your hard earned money. No, I don’t want to hear it anymore. Just do it.
I opened the game. Timed myself, and in 2 minutes and 27 seconds? I created this:
The game works on a hidden grid concept. Click a grid square, up pops a piece of land. Click the piece of land? Up pops a little house. Click the top of the house, you have the start of a tower. Click the side of it, you have the beginnings of a cantilevered bridge. And on and on. Another two minutes later, and that entire ring was built up for the richest of the richest people… And that center island, it may just topple the buildings are getting so high. But that’s the thing. I don’t need to care about the architectural soundness. I can just click, and amaze-balls away. I can marvel at how I just made a bridge, with stairs, or an water walk way. And with each click, we get a brilliant little pop, squish sound effect, things fly into the water… it is possibly the cheapest counseling session I, I mean, you, will ever have. It’s pretty glorious.
I mean, look at what this guy created with the game?!?
Yes, I am not a video game reviewer. Yes, I don’t normally talk to you about my headshots, and horrible exploits from Tuesday night counseling sessions. But this is different. This is a game that is going places. It’s counseling. It’s marveling. It’s glorious. Check it out and let me know what you think of it.
Edited by: CY