Making a functional city and a pretty one are often conflicting goals in strategy games and city builders. Getting your settlement to work as efficiently as it can usually means letting aesthetics fall by the wayside as you cram buildings together like Tetris blocks, linking them to optimize how they work together. That can be a bummer when you want to do well but also make a city that looks like a nice place to live, and now one strategy game that actually merges form and function perfectly is available on PlayStation 5.
Originally released on PC in 2022, Dorfromantik is an impressively simple game. Its rules are easy to internalize and there are no tricky controls to wrestle with, but out of that simplicity, it captures the joy of optimizing in a city builder, figuring out a tricky puzzle, and even sketching an idyllic landscape all at once.
