Here’s a trailer teasing its coming release: The aim is to look after your buildings and grow a community. If you can meet your building’s aspirations, they and your city’s population will grow, and the game will advance from the Victorian era through to the modern day. Fail your buildings and they’ll be demolished forever. It’s part puzzle game, as keeping buildings happy means rearranging them to find the perfect combination, but there’s a lot that seems familiar from traditional citybuilders. You can research new industries and unlock specialist areas such as finance hubs and theatre districts, and you’ll need to deal with electricity supply, noise pollution and transport issues. I play a lot of citybuilders, and while games like SimCity and Cities: Skylines are great at capturing cities at the macro scale, they never do much to represent the lives of individual buildings. Earlier today I was reading about Brighton’s Circus Street, which was named after a riding school that opened on the street in 1808, in a building which also housed a confectioners and coffee house. The circus was a failure, closed down, and the building became a picture gallery in the 1820’s and later a bazaar. I’d love if, through its silliness, Buildings Have Feelings Too! captured some of the reality of the ways in which buildings grow and are repurposed over time. You can wishlist Buildings Have Feelings Too! on Steam ahead of its release later this month, when it will cost £15/$20/€20.
