Because it does have a meaning, and as I discover, the meaning is perfect.
“Dorfromantik” is a German word.
“An older word,” Zwi Zausch tells me in a video call they all join me for.
Perfect, isn’t it?
The closest word we have in English is bucolic, which sounds like something to do with the plague.
The name didn’t stick straight away.
English audiences wouldn’t like it, they said.
And now you know what it means.
I wrote at length why inmy Dorfromantik reviewlast year.
It’s been a tremendous success.
But there’s no extravagance here, much to my gossipy disappointment.
The most exciting thing they did with the money was to pay themselves a wage - how bourgeois!
- and to pay back a loan they took from the state.
“And we could just do it all at once - the whole credit in one transaction, basically.
That was really crazy and really showed us how exceptional the success is.”
It’s just not what I expected.
I expected to meet a group of young students who were giddy with their unexpected success.
Maybe one of them had bought a flash new car or something.
Maybe one of them had bought a house.
So we thought that this right now is the right moment to take the risk and try."
And their Master’s focus: designing and writing about the process of making a game.
The question of “which game?”
But one of them stood out, as much for practical reasons as anything else.
So we had this two-day prototype where we already had the base mechanics implemented, basically.
They changed quite a bit since then but the base, the core was there.
And for many of the other prototypes, the vision wasn’t as clear."
And the less it needs, the less it needs to explain, making it understandable at a glance.
“We actually got quite a lot of these messages,” adds Heuberger.
Still today I actually get goosebumps to think about it.
It’s really touching."
The stars aligned, I suppose.
Popular German streamers streamed it.
“I was like, ‘What?!
What’s going on?’
I thought we were being trolled by something.
It was so surreal.”
“We were really happy but also really overwhelmed.
At some point, we couldn’t hardly grasp what’s going on.”
“Dopamine overflow,” says Sandro Heuberger.
And it’s been a busy year for updates since the April 2021 early access release.
There have been new seasonal biomes to vary what you see.
The update they’re particularly fond of, though, is the Undo button.
But the community desperately wanted it and so, eventually, Toukana acquiesced - and acquiesced in style.
Controller support on the other hand: that’s a tricky one.
“Yeah, it’s pretty much definitely happening,” Sandro Heuberger adds, reinforcing it.
Controller support is also intriguingly linked to the bigger question of what comes next for Toukana.
But they are being careful to say no more.
“This year will definitely still be a good year for Dorfromantik,” adds Falcke.
“There are a few things that I think will surprise some people and that are really cool.”
“We’re just really happy people,” Heuberger jumps in.
“We enjoyed the time with you.”
Whatever happens with Dorfromantik now, it’s already been a tremendous success.
And if it reaches wider audiences on PC and potentially console, then wonderful.
There are few games I’d rather see in everyone’s life.
Whether or not they manage to repeat the success of Dorfromantik almost doesn’t matter.
