WithDorfromantiklanding on Switch today, here’s a piece from Jay that takes a closer look at landscapes.
If you’re interested in the Switch port itself, we’re running a piece on Saturday.
I cant ever get my Dorfromantik dioramas to look quite right.
Other people seem to be able to make their rural idylls look balanced, organised.
Villages and farms are rounded while rivers gently meander.
For me, its the other way around.
Rivers stagnate in huge lakes while houses and fields snake across the landscape in jagged lines.
It chafes particularly because were all familiar with the kind of bucolic landscape that Dorfromantik tasks you with making.
you could play until you run out.
The whole game plays with a top-down view, presenting the land as both puzzle and art piece.
Forests, villages, and little steam trains on rickety railways are in.
Parks, cities, and roads are out.
Wheat fields might become lavender; deer appear in forests; towns become speckled with tiny pumpkins.
But fundamentally, the basics of Dorfromantiks presentation of landscape are unchangeable.
Its not surprising, then, that there are no skyscrapers or cars.
But what were nostalgic for doesnt come from a vacuum.
But these diverse experiences are often flattened in artistic representations.
On its surface, Dorfromantik, too, flattens.
The biggest omission from its tileset isnt multi-storey buildings or roads.
And its here where these contested meanings are hidden.
The goals themselves also have the push and pull of the political.
Making a sprawling town, perhaps not so much.
But that cocreation still takes place within the aesthetic constraints of the game itself.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the farm systems.
Im used to the patchwork quilt of theBritish landscape, seamed by crisscrossing hedgerows.
Making monolithic field systems feels wrong.
In other words, Dorfromantik raises its own contested meanings.
As an aesthetic object it bakes in assumptions about landscape and nostalgia.
But as a puzzle it can raise questions about interpretation and land usage.
Maybe thats why all my forests and fields snake.
I dont want to commit an area to one representation.
Where theres a neatly rounded village theres no room for a corridor of trees.
Each experiencing the space differently, each understanding it in their own way.
This, too, is a nostalgic representation, of course.
Maybe everything ends up in lines just because Im missing hedges.
