Townscaper: The Anti-SimCity | The American Conservative
Yet in this context of revanchist Cities hegemony, a legitimately groundbreaking new entry to the genre arrives in the form of Townscaper. The game s developer, Oskar Stålberg, cautiously describes Townscaper as more of a toy than a game. Whatever you prefer to call it, the game drops players down in a vast, calm body of water with two simple options: where to put buildings and what color these buildings should be. From this deceptively simple set of choices, buildings algorithmically combine into rowhouses or cottages or castles, eventually expanding into Dutch canal settlements, Italian hilltowns, or Yemeni Manhattans of the desert, depending on where the player s imagination takes them.