I don’t know if you’ve ever taken off in a plane from somewhere like Gatwick. There’s this moment, about thirty seconds into the flight, where you get enough height and you look down and England has become a cheery parody of itself. It’s all green and grass and roughly stitched together fields. There’s even a train tootling through it all, although sadly you’ll only see smoke coming from it if the electrical wiring has caught fire.
PlanetilesPublisher: MythicOwlDeveloper: MythicOwlPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC..
Anyway, this is what I think of as being Dorfromantik height. It’s the height from which that beautiful, thoughtful, mesmerising puzzle game is played. The farms and forests and rivers and towns all pass by beneath you as if you’re just out from Gatwick. You’re making your decisions about where to play tiles as you wait for the seatbelt sign to come off and the coffee trolley to make its first pass.
Planetiles is quite similar to Dorfromantik in many ways. It’s not a clone by any means, but it feels like it belongs on the same family tree as Dorfromantik. You scroll over the landscape and place tiles, which all come in different shapes here, made up of different congregations of squares. There are field tiles, sand tiles, mountain tiles, forest tiles. As you place them you get points for bunching like with like, but there are also missions that rack up points more quickly. It’s a perfect game to prod your way through over morning coffee, seemingly breezy but actually subtly taxing. Before you know it you’ve run out of tiles, or out of space and the whole thing’s over. Restart.
There are loads of elements that mark Planetiles out from Dorfromantik, but for me the biggie is the height at which you play. You’re no longer in a plane here. Instead you pass over the landscape at satellite height, and maps play out on little globes that you can move around and manipulate. Looking down at your terrain and seeing the planet curve away in all directions, it’s like looking at the earth through your front door’s spyhole, or seeing it, unexpectedly, in the back of a spoon. Sometimes Planetiles throws a catastrophe at you and you’ll need to deal with an earthquake or a volcano. All of this happens with you held softly at a distance. It’s very effective.