A literal rocket scientist quit her job to make this cozy city builder full of adorable gourd people
Chill building games are having a bit of a moment right now and the cozy game enjoyers are eating good. With that Tiny Glade release date looming next month, I'm so glad that I didn't get swept away and miss out on the adorable pastel city builder Gourdlets. Folks, you can decorate the inside of the buildings. I'm going to be stuck in this game forever. It's so much more detailed than I remember from the demo I tried last year, which makes total sense now that I know a rocket scientist quit her job to make it.
As with some of the other popular cozy building games of late, Gourdlets isn't a game you can win or lose. You don't even have any money to manage because "we tried explaining capitalism to the gourdlets but it made them feel too tired," its tutorial says when I first load it up. Same, little gourds. Instead you use a whole toolbar of terrains, trees, decorations, houses, and more to build an island in any size and shape you like for your tiny gourd people.
That's what Gourdlets has that so many players were begging for in the likes of Townscaper and Tiny Glade—little characters living inside their creations. Where Tiny Glade has buildings that procedurally react to what you create, Gourdlets' reactivity comes from its super cute citizens. Your Gourdlets will interact with the things you build: fishing on docks, working on farms, or riding a big Ferris Wheel. It's not just a diorama either, Gourdlets mature the more they interact with things and you can spend a lot more time managing their lives than I'd expected.
As they mature, Gourdlets contribute experience that you can use to call the "parcel train" which drops off new furniture items that you've not unlocked in the catalogue yet. You can name each of your Gourdlets, follow them around, and choose their outfits in the Town Ledger too. When decorating inside a house, you can determine which Gourdlets are allowed to enter, the background music and ambient sounds, and a dress code. Yes, a dress code. You might make a cute restaurant, for instance, and dictate that Gourdlets should wear a little party hat when they show up.
Just like some other cozy game darlings, Gourdlets was made by a mostly solo developer. Former aerospace engineer Preethi Vaidyanathan left her job last year to go all in on her game development side project under the name AuntyGames. Vaidyanathan tells PC Gamer that she started realizing she wanted to turn game development into a career when she began waking up two hours earlier than usual just to watch Godot game engine tutorials. "I’ve always worked on side projects, but definitely none that I would lose precious sleep over," she says.
Maybe it's just me, but when I hear "rocket engineer turned game developer" I expect them to be working on some highly detailed simulation like Kerbal Space Program or Oxygen Not Included or something.
"I don’t really play deep strategy games," Vaidyanathan tells me. "When I want to relax I either play games that are nostalgic for me like The Sims 2, or I just fish for hours in Stardew Valley until my mind is an empty void. Sometimes I want to work on complicated engineering problems, and sometimes I want to just lie there and not think too hard. I figured that making any game would be a complicated and challenging project, so I wanted playing it to be mindless fun."
Gourdlets is downright adorable but—and this may just be that I've not got the same brain fuel as an engineer—I wouldn't quite call it mindless. It actually hits the sweet spot of giving me goals to pursue. Even I, lover of building games, sometimes feel a little aimless in things as open-ended as Townscaper. Gourdlets' parcel train and expanding catalogue of unlockable objects gives just enough structure to keep me playing for *checks watch* several evenings and counting.
Gourdlets launched just last week and as for how that's gone, I asked Vaidyanathan whether it's been harder to launch a rocket or a game, to which she says: "My annoying and technically correct answer is: it depends on the game and the rocket."
Fair enough. You can snag Gourdlets over on Steam for just a fiver, which is another point in its favor in my book.