PPG Game Of The Year 2024 - 37 - Cozy Construction

One surprising development of the city building genre has been the flourishing of the "chill" builder - one more about the joy of learning and uncovering hidden synergies and systems, and/or just creating a cute little space just because, led by the explosion of such games as Dorfromantik and ISLANDERS.

Furnish Master
Make Your House A Home
Interior designers rejoice. Furnish apartments, houses, commercial and outdoors real estate. Has a story mode with challenges to complete, or play free form and run wild with your ideas.

Orstead
Incremental Resource Management
A chill builder with resource management and progression systems built on incremental play, quests and upgrades. Clean cut aesthetics match the simpler yet engaging mechanical complexity level.

SUMMERHOUSE
2D Front Facing House Building
A super chill game about building just small, unique houses from a 2D front on perspective. It's all about creativity and the joy of making something wholly your own.

Bounties of Babylon
Dorfromantik X Sea Exploration
A kind of interactive tile based solo board game where you expand out an oceanic map, create settlements, complete quests and get into navel fights.

Le Château
Minimalist Castle Creation
Neat little castle builder that limits it's scope dramatically to help you focus in creating the small little floating castle of your dreams.

Laysara: Summit Kingdom (EA)
Mountainous City Builder
A somewhat traditional city builder with a unique setting that comes with unique challenges alongside a unique caste system for its population to manage.

Diluvian Winds
Fantastical Hamlet Expansion
Build out from humble beginnings to bustling, sprawling structures on land, sea and up into the air from a 2D side on perspective in the same vein as Fallout Shelter or the like.

Dystopika
Dark Cozy Creativity
A city building sandbox tht strips away the technical management in favour of a cyberpunk dystopia vibes based approach. Focused on creating art over being a challenge.

Diorama Builder
Intricate Model Construction
Literally what it says on the tin. Take pleasure in the construction of little action sets with a bunch of fun tools and a plethora of pieces.

TerraScape
Hex Based City Puzzler
Falling squarely in the Dorfromantik bucket with exceptionally high quality art direction. Place buildings, find hidden synergies, build a utopia.

Preserve (EA)
Relaxing Hexagonal Ecosystem Builder
Use cards to build up little slices of nature in Dorfromantik style chill building environment. Delight in the little things that happen as you create interconnected habitats.

Gourdlets
Anthropomorphic Vegetable Town
Build out little towns for veggie folk, with no goals or objectives other than your creativity to guide you. Can be played as a full screen game or as a bottom of the screen experience.

Technotopia
Futuristic Story Driven Puzzle
Build out a technocratic city ruled by 4 factions: the public, government, the elites, and business. Balance their lust for power while trying to keep the entire population happy. Bit more puzzle and story focused.

And The Best Cozy Building Game Of 2024 Is…

Minami Lane
Single Street Builder
Build up a cozy little street with different little shops to bring joy to the residents of this little place. A single street, a few hours of gameplay, a cheap price. What more could you want? I like that the smaller scale and success of this game is show there is room for smaller experiences amongst the never ending live service games that soak up all your time, money and energy.