If you’ve been following my reviews, you’ll recall I was able to try out the demo of Cutout Village from DevilishGames in May. You can see my thoughts at that time HERE. Now, the full game is set to release on October 21st, and I was lucky enough to get early access to review it. I was excited then, and I am happy to report that the full game did not disappoint. It’s everything I wanted it to be, even if my skills at cutting and pasting the beautiful ‘paper’ buildings didn’t get any better.
Cutout Village is a virtual town restoration game where you rebuild the town’s buildings, benches, light posts, and trees by gutting and gluing paper models. It’s undeniably cozy and, thankfully, forgiving. You start out with the dog and cat protagonists returning to the village where they spent their childhood after inheriting an old family home. It is now abandoned, and as you work your way through building over 50 buildings and other decorations, your aim is to create a bustling town with new inhabitants and visitors. As you work through the rebuilding process, you uncover the town’s story as well, bringing it back to life.
First, you plant an orange tree. Each building and decoration has requirements, whether it’s a certain number of specific fruits, or even residents or visitors. It’s not demanding; in fact, it’s one of the coziest games I’ve played in some time. No timers, no fail states, no drama, or friendships to maintain. No arduous journeys to collect materials. Everything is at your fingertips. The fruit matures quickly, so you are never waiting long either. Build decorations as you unlock them, and things will go smoothly. Decorations bring visitors to the town, and buildings, like homes, a bakery, a pharmacy, a bar, etc., will bring permanent residents to your growing town. Each build you complete gives you a rating of 1-3 stars.
For cozy gamers, this game ticks a lot of boxes, but if you’re a fan of paper crafts in real life, one very interesting feature is that each time you construct a building, you earn a PDF file that you can use to print out a real version of the building that you can make yourself. As someone whose skills were questionable at best in-game (I had a lot of 1-star builds), I am curious if I would fare better with real paper. Perhaps I will take some time out and try for myself. If you want a complete collection, the books are also available to buy on Amazon.
Cutout Village has a gorgeous hand-drawn art style and can’t help but make me nostalgic for the times I sat around with friends crafting while growing up. The way the characters move around the world is exactly as you would move them yourself, with the printed side always front-facing.
Characters will have dialogue bubbles when you need to talk to them, making it easy to know when to get more information. You can play with a keyboard and mouse or controller, and both were easy to play with; the mechanics are intuitive.
This style of game is nice for people who want a game that you can pick up and put down whenever you like, but it also has that ‘just one more building’ grip on me and I lost large blocks of time without realizing it. Every time I decided that this was the last building for today, I’d notice the fruit trees had matured, and I had enough fruit to build the next building, and the cycle continued. DevilishGames knew what they were doing. Just one more building meant I was close to finishing a section; then I could build a bridge to the third, and then I needed to see what was new.
In the beginning, the buildings are simple lines and angles but progressively become more complex as you progress. Small details make you slow down and pay attention, although laughing hysterically at my hack jobs brought me great joy.
Cutout Village has so much charm, and it’s a lovely little escape from the busy real world. It will be launching in Early Access on October 21st for an incredible price of $11.99 USD, with a generous 20% launch discount as well. DevilishGames expects the Early Access window to be about 3-6 months. I can’t recommend this game enough, and not just because my name is in the credits 😉
Until next time…be good to yourself and be good to each other.
**Special thanks to David Ferriz and DevilishGames for the review code**
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