A cute little building game released this week called Gourdlets, all about designing cozy towns for little vegetable people to walk around and enjoy themselves in. Made by solo designer AuntyGames, we first saw a simple demo of it back in 2022, but this full release is way richer with stuff to build and quality of life delights.
The basic premise is that you plop down all kinds of stuff to build a townscape for the little Gourdlets to come and explore—that's it, really. The delight comes in the huge range of things to place and landscapes to design, then watching the little gourdlets make themselves at home. As they enjoy things they'll grow flowers that earn you presents delivered on the train—all of which are new and cool things to place in your town.
Gourdlets is firmly in that category of relaxed game-and-toy that doesn't ask much of its player besides a sense of play and wonder. It's the same kind of delight you might have gotten from stuff like Townscaper or Galaxy Garden or the more recent Dystopika.
That said, Gourdlets definitely has more full-fledged features and a bit more flexibility on its purpose than some others we've seen. It's designed to work as a fullscreen application, but it also has a bottom-screen mode that stretches it across a section of your monitor—something that might be fun to put up as a bit of interest while you're doing productivity stuff or chores.
You can find Gourdlets on Steam, where it's a smooth $4.
