Dorfromantik

Dorfromantik is a single-player strategy and puzzle video game in which the player places a series of hexagonal tiles containing elements of a pastoral environment on a plane to create a landscape. Each tile consists of one to six land types: forest, barren, village, water, railroad, and field, with each side assigned to a type. The game begins with a placed tile with all six sides barren, and a stack of 40 random tiles to be placed. The player can only place the top tile from the stack, and can only see the top three tiles.

Tiles can be rotated before being placed and can be put anywhere in the landscape as long as it touches at least one existing tile. The sole restriction is that placed tiles cannot cause water paths or railroad lines to abruptly end at the edge of a tile. Once placed, a tile cannot be moved again, although the player can undo their actions.

Dorfromantik was developed by four German and Swiss students studying at HTW Berlin: Timo Falcke, Sandro Heuberger, Luca Langenberg, and Zwi Zausch. The four had all received their bachelor's degree in game design from the university, and Heuberger and Falcke had created and published the game ViSP - Virtual Space Port. After graduating they all began jobs, but when HTW Berlin started a master's program in game design they returned. As they began their first semester in the master's program there, the four founded Toukana Interactive to create games as they felt it was the last time in their lives they knew they would all be together focusing on their own projects instead of working at other companies.

They wanted to focus Toukana on creating "minimalistic, inviting games". The group focused their master's theses on the creation of a game and received support from the school's DE:HIVE Institute for starting the company.

Dorfromantik received "generally favorable reviews", according to the review aggregator Metacritic. In addition to the awards it won and was nominated for during development, after the release of the full game, it was nominated for the "Sit Back and Relax" category at the 2022 Steam Awards and Best Indie Game at the 2022 Golden Joystick Awards. Toukana has not released any sales numbers, but did say that they were able to pay back all of their grants as soon as the game was released in early access, as well as fund the development of their next game.

Critics highly praised the gameplay, though there were mixed opinions on the depth. Several reviewers, such as Wolfgang Rabenstein of GameStar, Robert Purchese of Eurogamer, and the reviewer for Edge, called the gameplay "pleasant and relaxing", "satisfying", and "meditative". Katharine Castle of Rock Paper Shotgun said it was one of the "most charming, welcoming and relaxing game worlds". Marcus Stewart of Game Informer and Neal Ronaghan of Nintendo World Report said that it had a good balance of coziness and strategy, while Zoey Handley of Destructoid felt that it had too little strategy, leading their mind to wander.