Build tiny castles in another new relaxing diorama-em-up, out now

rockpapershotgun.com:

I approve of the recent trend towards making building games as relaxing as possible (e.g. Summerhouse). Today sees the release of a new one on Steam, this one a teeny medieval city builder called Le Château that gives you strict limitations for building a castle. You can have a go of the demo for free - I like it a bunch.

You choose the size of the little base for your castle and then have a crack at it, laying down or deleting any of the pieces you have in your builder tool box at will. You get new pieces the more you build, so it's an encouraging process. Maybe you build a very enclosed castle with no interior space. Perhaps that tall tower is actually part of a monastery. Maybe you don't actually want to build a full castle, maybe you want to build a section of the outer wall and put down some peasant houses and mud, and a little bit of water.

A nice touch is that there are some lightly animated aspects. Sections of crenelated wall have guards popping back and forth, and houses curl smoke into the air. I really like that you can put down trees with a little fairy ring of mushrooms, for some reason. And most importantly, you can change the cardinal colour of your castle's roof, flags and guard uniforms.

I've not played loads of Le Château but I really like a) that it is very small and b) that it reminds me of the Playmobil castle set I had when I was a kid. More broadly I like games like this signalling a return to people embracing the concept of 'play' in games, where you just do things with tools for having fun, rather than dinging levels and putting ticks in boxes. I say that, but I do absolutely love to do list games. Look, inside me are at least two wolves. Anyway, another thing that's good about Le Château is that it's a cheap little toy for under a fiver on Steam (with an introductory launch discount as well).