Ophelia Payne

I hadn’t heard much about ShantyTown before I came across the demo during Steam Next Fest. Developed by Erik Rempen and published by Kinephantom Games, I was immediately taken by the graphic style and its simplistic look. What greeted me was deeper and more complex than expected, and I loved all the details.

ShantyTown is a cozy builder where you place objects and buildings on a 3D diorama. You take on the role of a surveyor, building and photographing in 20 locations (8 required and 12 optional). Each location has its own optional requirements and its own challenges. Each building requires light, utility and décor challenges. You can see what category each building needs (and how many of them), and you can choose the items available to you to fulfill these requirements.

You are encouraged to build up rather than outwards, as you see in most building games. You will make good use of rotating your camera to find the perfect placement of each item. As your location grows and you complete upgrades, you will unlock more items and buildings to use in your creations. This gives you more ways to shape your towns. Each item’s place shows you an orb representing the area of influence of each item. This helps with knowing how the item you are about to place might influence the town.

The final step in each level is taking a photo in-game of your charming and cluttered masterpiece. The camera tools have quite a few options to make your photograph perfect.

Once you complete each level, you will open a variety of items to use in the sandbox/creative mode. This is where your imagination can run wild, everything you’ve unlocked at your disposal.

I was really taken by how these small footprint shanty towns had intrinsic beauty, and I found myself exploring nooks and crannies, adding small details in alleys and on decks, adding neon signs and beautiful lanterns to the towns. Providing things like electricity, satellites, air conditioning, etc., to homes and shops helps these towns grow and reach their full potential.

All this charm is accompanied by a beautiful soundtrack crafted by vaporwave artist Macroblank. As you can also control the weather in the game, I found that playing during the stormy weather created a calming acoustic experience.

This is a cozy and casual game, where there are no wrong answers. There are no time constraints and no pressure. You can follow your imagination, fitting everything into a dense living space that just feels right.

Until next time…be good to yourself and be good to each other.

**Thank you to Kinephantom Games, SilkSoftworks and Press Engine for supplying the review code**