Shantytown Review

Shantytown is a very simple little game, focused on building little dioramas. It’s similar to titles like Dystopika and Tiny Glade, with a little more active direction. Your main goal is building small but dense urban areas, while making sure each one is suitable for those who might be living there, by making sure it’s all well-lit, functional and decorated.

Most of the game feels fundamentally like a sandbox, but there are puzzles which function as lim itations to your building ability, which I find adds some nice structure to the gameplay. Sandboxes are fun, but they’re inherently limited by your own creativity, and I often find myself going in circles and repeating the same ideas. The puzzles in Shantytown however, force me to step outside of my usual playstyles and create something far more interesting.

These puzzles typically require you to focus on upgrading a certain type of building, or building in certain ways, such as keeping under a height limit, or even being limited by the locales themselves. For example, sometimes you’re required to build on a restricted amount of wall space rather than a more open area.

You’re given a rotating queue of items that slowly tick down as you place them, meaning you need to make clever decisions on which items to place when, and how that affects future decision-making. These items also have a lot of variants and colour options, so despite being limited in the objects themselves, there’s plenty of choice.

As you progress through the campaign, you’ll gain new items that you can use in the creative mode too, which is a complete sandbox environment. In creative mode, you're not only able to edit the main story maps without limitation, but also create your own in The Blankspace, which is a blank map, allowing a lot of freedom. I would, however, like some ability to terraform, even if only in The Blankspace, which would open up your options massively.

Shantytown is unbelievably chill and a great game for just sitting back and relaxing. The gameplay is fundamentally simple, but still engaging, and the art direction and music all form together into a very pleasant experience. There are still some small additions I’d like to see, like Terraforming, and some more control over environmental settings, such as certain weather variables like rain strength and fog amount.