| Dorfromantik | |
| Developer: | Toukana Interactive |
| Publisher: | Toukana Interactive |
| Genre: | Puzzle, strategy |
| Modes: | Single-player |
Dorfromantik is a 2022 strategy/puzzle video game developed and published by Toukana Interactive. By placing hexagonal tiles of a pastoral environment to create a landscape, the player earns points and additional tiles by connecting like sides of the tiles together, closing off fields, forests, and villages, and completing quests to make areas of contiguous regions. An additional creative mode allows the player to create their own landscapes.
Dorfromantik was developed by four German and Swiss students in a game design master's program at HTW Berlin. As their potential last opportunity to work together as student team, they founded Toukana to create a peaceful, minimalist game. Originally one of several small prototypes in early 2020, the game became the team's main focus after garnering early notice as part of an Itch.io game bundle. The game's title is a German word meaning "village romanticization", or a nostalgic feeling for the countryside. The game itself was inspired by romanticist and impressionist landscape paintings and city-building games.
The game was first released in as an early access title in March 2021, which led to a spike in attention, as well as awards and nominations. After several updates, the full version was released for Windows in April 2022 and as a Nintendo Switch port in September 2022. The game received positive reviews, especially for its aesthetics and design, but was also criticized for a lack of depth. A cooperative board game version was published by Pegasus Spiele as Dorfromantik: The Board Game in February 2023, which won that year's Spiel des Jahres award. It was followed by a competitive two-player version, Dorfromantik: The Duel, in February 2024.
Dorfromantik is a single-player strategy/puzzle video game in which the player places a series of hexagonal tiles containing elements of a pastoral environment on a plane to create a landscape. Each tile consists of one to six land types: forest, barren, village, water, railroad, and field, with each side assigned to a land type. The game begins with a placed tile with all six sides barren, and a stack of 40 random tiles to be placed.[1] The player can only place the top tile from the stack, and can only see the top three tiles. Tiles can be rotated before being placed and can be put anywhere in the landscape as long as it touches at least one existing tile. The sole restriction is that placed tiles cannot cause water paths or railroad lines to abruptly end at the edge of a tile. Once placed, a tile cannot be moved again, although the player can undo their actions.[2]
Points are awarded when a placed tile's edges match the edges of neighboring tiles. Some tiles have associated quests, such as creating a railway line including that tile with a minimum length, or creating a contiguous field including that tile with an exact number of edges. Quests may also have a follow-up quest to close off the area, such as a field, so that no more field edges can be joined to it. Completing quests gives the player additional tiles, as does matching a tile's edges with those of all six surrounding tiles.[3] The game ends when the player runs out of tiles.[4] Hidden tiles with quests can be found a distance from the starting position which, if completed, unlock achievements. Completing these achievements grants the player new tile designs, such as a clock tower village tile or an animal which wanders a forest, as well as biomes, or art styles for the game. In addition to the standard game mode, there is a creative mode with no tile limit and challenge modes with modified rules.
Dorfromantik was developed by four German and Swiss students studying at HTW Berlin: Timo Falcke, Sandro Heuberger, Luca Langenberg, and Zwi Zausch. The four had all received their bachelor's degree in game design from the university, and Heuberger and Falcke had created and published the game ViSP - Virtual Space Port. After graduating and getting jobs, they returned to HTW Berlin when it started a master's program in game design. During their first semester in the master's program, the four founded Toukana Interactive as their last opportunity to create "minimalistic, inviting games" as a student team before likely working in different companies. The group focused their master's theses on the creation of a game and received support from the school's DE:HIVE Institute for starting the company.
They built ten different prototype games that semester, each over a few days; one of them was created for a Ludum Dare game jam at the end of April with the theme "Keep it Alive", which the group approached with the concept of "keeping a civilization alive by balancing it out with its surrounding nature". They chose placing tiles as a simple core mechanic, which was given purpose through quests. At the end of the two-day game jam, the core gameplay of Dorfromatik was complete, and the team had decided on the direction of the game. They chose Dorfromantik as the game's placeholder title, a German word that translates into "village romanticization", or a nostalgic feeling for the countryside. Although the team were advised to change it for English-speaking audiences, the name ended up sticking.
In June 2020, Itch.io sold a bundle of over 1700 games for charity, titled the "Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality". Dorfromantik was included in the bundle, which sold over 800,000 copies and lead to a spike in attention to the game. Feeling that the game was the most promising of the prototypes, the team decided to pursue further development. After working nearly two years on the game, they originally planned to release the finished game in late 2021, but eventually decided to release an early access version six months early on March 25, 2021 due to the positive reception to the game. The following month, the game won Best Game Design and Best Debut and was nominated for Best Family Game at the Deutscher Computerspielpreis awards, followed by a nomination for Best Student Game at the Independent Games Festival Awards in May. The studio hired a community manager and marketing professional, and continued developing the game. The game was intentionally self-published to help the team learn all parts of creating a game.
At the time of the early access release, Toukana was still aiming to release the full game in late 2021. In July, however, this was pushed out to spring 2022. The remainder of the development time was spent improving the game and adding features, such as the Creative mode in August 2021, and additional themes, quests, and tiles. The game was nominated for Best Indie Game at the 2021 Gamescom trade show in August, and won Best German Game at the Deutscher Entwicklerpreis awards in December. The full release of the game for Windows was made on April 28, 2022, and included additional game modes and music. A version for the Nintendo Switch was released on September 29, 2022.
The design of the game was inspired by European board games, as well as by the video games Islanders (2019), Townscaper (2021), and Tetris (1985). The game's setting was inspired by the four team members all growing up in the German and Swiss countryside, in different settings ranging from mountains to the seaside. The art style was influenced by landscape paintings with a romantic, idealized style, particularly romanticist and impressionist paintings, rather than realistic portrayals. The music was composed by Laryssa Okada and Pygoscelis; the team asked them to make ambient and meditative tracks that would not be boring or distract from the gameplay. The twelve tracks for the game were released as two separate purchases alongside the game's early access and full release as Dorfromantik Soundtrack Vol. 1 and 2.
Dorfromantik received generally positive reviews when it was released via early access.[5] For the full release, the game received "generally favorable" reviews according to review aggregator Metacritic.
Eurogamer praised the game for being simple enough to play casually, with mastering tile placement making it compelling in the long run.[6] The Guardian liked the atmosphere of Dorfromantik, writing, "the ambience is soothing, your actions gently shooed along by a spare but cheery piano and synth soundtrack."[7] Polygon described how the game discouraged optimization, instead focusing on offering new challenges for the player to contend with, saying, "This is a very clean and logical system that has been designed to produce unexpected, organic outcomes. That's an incredible achievement".[8] While enjoying the progression system, Destructoid criticized the lack of variety in the tile sets: "There are "biomes" that you can find by branching out far enough, but these merely change the colors of the trees, ground, and houses. I think it would be neat if enough village tiles would give way to more modern skyblockers".[9] Rock Paper Shotgun described the creative mode as, "particularly generous, as it lets you save those picturesque creations you've spent so long building up in both your mind and onscreen, and seeing them through to their imagined conclusion".[10]
| 2021 | 23rd Independent Games Festival Awards | Best Student Game | ||
| Gamescom Awards | Best Indie Game | |||
| Deutscher Computerspielpreis (German Computer Games Award) | Best Family Game | |||
| Best Game Design | ||||
| Young Talent Award Best Debut | ||||
| Deutscher Entwicklerpreis (German Developer Award) | Best German Game | |||
| 2022 | Steam Awards | Sit Back and Relax | [11] | |
| Golden Joystick Awards | Best Indie Game | [12] |
In 2023, a board game adaption of Dorfromantik was published as Dorfromantik: The Board Game by Pegasus Spiele. It was designed by independent designers Lucas Zach and Michael Palm; Zach had seen Dorfromantiks Deutscher Computerspielpreis award wins and tried out the game, then the pair asked Pegasus, with which they regularly worked, to approach Toukana. According to Pegasus co-founder Karsten Esser, this is the opposite of the norm for popular video games, where typically the rights-holders approach a board game maker to make a spin-off game. Palm and Zach quickly made a digital prototype for a board game, and Toukana agreed to pursue the project. According to Palm, adapting the video game to a board game was generally straightforward due to its design; the primary challenge was changing the computer-controlled systems so that the player would not need to make any calculations until the end of the game.
Dorfromantik: The Board Game was released in February 2023. It is a cooperative game that can be played with one to six players, with games taking 30 to 60 minutes. Like in the video game, new tiles and elements are unlocked as the game is repeatedly played, with players encouraged to record their scores as a "campaign" to earn the right to open up sealed boxes. It won the 2023 Spiel des Jahres award, and was a Recommended Casual Game in the 2024 American Tabletop Awards. While sales numbers have not been published, according to Esser winning the Spiel des Jahres typically results in hundreds of thousands of extra sales to retailers in the following months. A competitive version of the game for two players was released as Dorfromantik: The Duel in February 2024. A sequel to the original board game, Dorfromantik: Sakura, is planned for release in October 2024, with similar gameplay but new tiles and a new "cherry blossom" mechanic.