This is accomplished by completing quests that pop-up throughout the game. The main aim of the game, in as much as it has one beyond making pretty landscapes, is to stop that stack of tiles from running out, so you can build and build to your heart’s content (if that’s all you want to do without the gameplay loop, the front-end of Dorfromantik suggests that a creative sandbox mode is on the way). Some of the unlocks are not new tiles but new biomes that affect the appearance of all tiles in them. At some point the stack of tiles will be empty and the game will be over, leaving you to consider your score and the picturesque (or, sometimes, not so picturesque) slice of rural paradise you have created. Matching up the terrain features on the edge of your placed tile with stuff already on the board builds up large areas of that type of terrain, from sprawling farms and forests to winding train tracks and canals. At any one time you can only access the top tile from your stack and you have to place it in the play area, touching one of the sides of a tile that is already down. In the bottom-right of your screen is a stack of hexagonal tiles that contain different features of landscape trees, fields, houses, rivers and train tracks amongst other things. The essence of the gameplay in Dorfromantik is very simple. One of the big lessons of Dorfromantik is that, apparently, the best train line is one that goes nowhere. That I’ve spent nearly fifty hours playing some variation of Hexcells surprised me, but perhaps it shouldn’t, given the niche that it fills in my collection. Hexcells Plus isn’t too much further down the list, either, at sixteen hours. At thirty hours on record I’ve played it more than Stardew Valley, more than Endless Legend or Baldur’s Gate 3, more than Darkest Dungeon or Hitman. 34th on my list of most-played games was Hexcells Infinite. Last time I took a look, I saw something quite surprising. Seeing which games have really captured my imagination is interesting and I check in every so often to see how things have changed. Something I like to do now and then is to take a scroll through my Steam library on the mobile app because, by default, it lists them in order of time played. In Dorfromantik I think I might have found another one that fills the same gap. Other people no doubt have their equivalents that they use, in many ways, as a form of mindfulness pure relaxation. It uses the brain just enough, and in the right ways, to be interesting and to keep your attention, without being stressful or demanding too much of you. Something to bridge the gap between the focus and intensity of work and the downtime of the evening. I play it most often at the end of a work day as a form of mental warm-down really. That’s what Hexcells does for me, that most other games in my collection don’t. Perhaps one thing that we don’t always think of computer games being though, is relaxing, or even tranquil. Computer games can be many things exciting, tense, inspiring, emotive, challenging, even stressful.
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