What is your city builder was actually on an island where a train brought you vegetable creatures to live, laugh and love… without any economy whatsoever?! Gourdlets is the latest cosy game to eschew the norms of building towns and cities as it opts for a straight to the point approach. This is an island designer game suitable for anyone looking for a relaxed and cute time.
In Gourdlets you start with a blank canvas – a plot of water to build your island on. A train track runs through the water to deliver gifts or new Gourdlets to arrive on the island. They don’t need food, water, money, shelter or anything at all. They are entirely autonomous too although you can name them, change their colours and give them an accessory to make them feel unique. Each Gourdlet starts out immature but through social interaction with various objects and each other, they will grow as a person over time. They’ll then sprout flowers which accumulate to unlock some extra world building furniture or objects. Aside from that – everything else is available at your fingertips from the get go. It is up to you to get creative and design your island.
First up, you’ll lay the floor. Grass, sand, path or dock – its up to you and using simple tools you can paint and design your island in a grid formation however you like. You can then lay down crops, fountains, bins, signs, fences, lampposts (the day/night cycle is fast but also player overriden if you want control) and cute things like mailboxes to get your island looking well lived in. There are a variety of houses and buildings to lay down too and every object has multiple colours which means you can theme or pattern objects as you see fit. It is as simple as selecting something from the menu and then placing it down and if you want to see things from a different angle, you can rotate the camera in 90 degree spins too. It is simple and fast to get things laid down.
Once buildings are laid, you can then go inside them where each building will present you with boxes to open. You can choose to ignore them, delete them and build your own interiors from scratch but sometimes the theming of items in the boxes presents nice ideas. All the gym equipment will appear in one building, cakes another, musical instruments in another and game consoles and arcades in another. You can wallpaper the walls, add interior walls and be very specific about the design of each building if you want to. The Gourdlets will arrive wherever you are and will start interacting with whatever you put down and that is super cute and engrossing to watch.
Indeed the titular creatures are a lesson in fuzzy pixel characterisation. For what little detail you can get, they are charming and squeaky cute. They waddle along with gleeful ramshackle happiness and look endearing and silly. As you invite more and more, the island comes alive and feels like a bustling environment as you go upwards of 30 running around. Sometimes they will just stand there but you can pick them up and drop them somewhere else and they spring back to life again. Since there is no failure states and Gourdlets is really a city builder like Summertown is a cosy street builder, I found watching the creatures going about their business was half the fun of the game. It led me to play little and often – checking in on my little gang to see what they are up to.
This means that if you are coming for deeply layered city mechanics or multi-levelled lanscape designing – you’ll be disappointed. Gourdlets isn’t that game. It doesn’t intend to be and it isn’t priced to suggest it will provide it either. This is like building a house in The Sims and then using those same tools to build a pastel island for your homes to sit in. If you know that going in, you’ll have a great time. The game run smoothly throughout my playtime to date. My only minor quibble is that sometimes the UI is quite large when you’ve got menus open and you are trying to place objects inside buildings. It can get in way and you can’t move the camera much to sort it out. On the flipside, I really liked the terraforming line option which locks your grass or sand laying down in strips – perfect for those that like rigid structures. Some items being locked as indoors only is slightly annoying too such as board games. I wanted to make a board game terrace in a garden but you can’t quite do it.
Breezy, relaxing, easy to understand and quick to get dopamine hits of satisfaction back from, Gourdlets is a distilled and streamlined Sims meets Builder game. If you want to design without the limits of an economy or a budget, this is a great game to dive into. I could see this being used in a way that The Sims was too – capturing screenshots or recordings to tell a fictional story. Use your imagination – Gourdlets will pay you back in spades.
Review copy provided by publisher. Out now on Steam.
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