In most city-building games, decorating and detailing your streets and buildings is a side activity that many enjoy, but has little or no effect on gameplay. Town to City is different.
Galaxy Grove has created a cozy city builder in which making sure your city looks nice for its inhabitants is pretty much the main point.
The first difference from many games of this genre is immediately apparent as soon as you draw your first street. You’re not beholden to any grid or need to build neighborhoods based on straight roads.
While you can build the usual grid-like networks if you so wish, Town to City encourages you to go entirely freehand, drawing winding paths as curvy and as cute as you wish them to be. You will be able to place your buildings without excessive worry about min-maxing the space, and they’ll easily adapt to the streets’ shape.
The visuals add to the coziness of the concept, as everything is built with voxels, including your citizen. You can think about Minecraft, but on a much smaller scale and without the grid. This is complemented by warm lighting that is pretty much spot-on and augments the relaxed vibe.
The core of the gameplay is pretty familiar, as your population will be divided into social categories with increasingly complex needs that you’ll draw to your town in sequence as you satisfy said needs with your buildings and services.
If you want a rather fitting comparison, you can think about the Anno franchise, but since this is on a smaller, more granular scale, individual residents and families have their own personal requests that you’ll have to satisfy to be the best mayor ever.
As your population grows, you’ll unlock new town tiers, which will in turn unlock new buildings and options.
This is where decoration and detailing come into the gameplay spotlight, as some of your residents will need to live in a beautiful place to be happy. Efficiency and min-maxing won’t be enough to satisfy them. Some will even need specific types of decoration to enjoy their new home.
So you’ll find yourself meticulously placing fences, flower vases, lampposts, and all kinds of cute amenities to make your people feel truly at home.
Another rather amazing element is the fact that your decoration will adapt to where they’re built and can be attached to buildings, and often they have a sizable number of adaptive variations.
You can place a flower base on the ground, but if you attach it to a window, it’ll become a window box. Place the same flowers in water, and they’ll turn into water lilies. This applies to most decorations, and there is an absolutely mindboggling variety available.
I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll spend a lot more time planting flowers and placing benches in just the right spots than looking at budget spreadsheets.
I played the game at Gamescom, and I can definitely tell you that there are few gaming events as stressful and tense as Gamescom, especially when you don’t have a big team and you need to run from booth to booth (often hundreds of meters apart) with extremely tight time tolerances.
Yet, I came out of the demo relaxed and even a bit refreshed, which I can’t say about literally any other game I played at the show. While the time I had with it was limited, it certainly left me wanting to play more, and I was melancholic about leaving my growing town behind after decorating it with so much love.
The good news is that neither I nor you need to wait long to play Town to City, as its early access begins on PC next week, on September 16.
Considering the astonishing variety in decorations and options available in the demo I played, before the early access even starts, I can’t wait to see what this little, cozy game grows into when it is fully released. I have a good feeling, and since this is a cozy game, I suppose that means the mission is accomplished.
If you’d like to watch more of our coverage from Gamescom 2025, you can check out our interview with Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann, a chat with Invincible VS Executive Producer Mike Willette.
We also have an interview with Lost Hellden developers Julien Bourgeois and Mario Rizzo, and another interesting chat about Reaper Actual with Distinct Possibility Studios Chief Creative Officer Matt Higby.
Lastly, we talked with Heroes of Might and Magic: Older Era Narrative Lead and Localization Manager Katharina Viveros Shevchuk and Community Manager and Junior Marketing Manager Alexandru “Kyraha,” IGDA Foundation Executive Director Alyssa Walles, and Atari Senior Director of Sales and Marketing David Lowey.
Of course, plenty more is coming, so stay tuned on Simulation Daily for more interviews and previews from the show.
