Reader, I have a confession to make. I have tried long and hard to like adorable citybuilder Townscaper, but I just cannot muster much affection for it. I love how it looks, I love what it does, and I will endlessly admire how its little multi-coloured building bricks morph and shift, smooshed together in far more creative ways than I could ever manage myself. But when presented with a blank canvas and no direction on what to do with said multi-coloured building bricks, my mind seizes up and straight up refuses to extract any joy from it. It's a feeling I fear will apply to the equally charming Tiny Glade when that eventually comes out as well, based on the very lovely GIFs I've seen of it so far, and honestly, there are times when I worry my brain is just a teeny bit broken and I have lost the ability to find joy in what are clearly very joyful little creations.
But then I play games like Pile Up!, a micro citybuilder that's very much in the same vein as Townscaper, and realise, oh no, I do just need some objectives and structure to my game playing for everything to be fine again.
