Build-A-Village Workshop
HIGH Tight city-building controls and lots of customization.
LOW Each experience ends abruptly.
WTF Why am I able to infinitely stack bushes into the sky?
Tranquil Isle is all about building a tiny island village far away from everything, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
The objective of Tranquil Isle, if you can even call it an objective, is to place buildings around an archipelago’s town center and slowly expand the population by building houses, artisan buildings, and other fixtures, while also expanding to other islands. Each building the player can place also has a point total assigned to it, with certain buildings buffing and debuffing others.
As the points add up, Tranquil Isle presents the player with two options for buildings to populate their village with after certain point thresholds, like a choice between one group of an altar and five houses, or another group comprising a farm and some stables. It’s an effort to give players more control over their end score, which tallies up all the points for every building placed across their village, after which the player can move on to a new project.
A player can experience Tranquil Isle in two different styles — the first being a purely numbers-based experience where they attempt to stack as many buildings as close to each other as possible, while combining certain groups of buildings and their buffs to get the highest score possible. The other is to create an aesthetically pleasing paradise to look at.
Mechanically, the first style is a complex puzzle to solve, but placing certain buildings next to each other makes intuitive sense. Forager buildings work better when they’re not in contact with any other nearby buildings. The mills with big windmills get buffed by nearby farms, but are debuffed by other mills within a certain distance. Houses buff the town center, as well as altars and town halls where people who live in these houses certainly congregate.
The best part of this buff and debuff system is that it naturally lends itself to creating towns that look aesthetically pleasing, so it rarely compromises any part of itself. I don’t play builder-adjacent games like The Sims or Frostpunk because I feel like my poor design choices would ruin whatever architectural layouts make a well-run city look the part, but Tranquil Isle takes that out of the equation, and makes me feel like a somewhat capable city planner.
Aesthetically, designing my islands to make them look more lived-in came secondary to placing down buildings — but that doesn’t mean I still didn’t try to dress them up.
While each building has spacial requirements that prevent them from being too close to one another, there’s no limit to the amount of decorations the player can put on every building and empty inch of grass in town. I found the limits of customization in Tranquil Isle when I found out I could infinitely stack decoration objects like rocks and shrubs on top of each other. Naturally, I made infinitely tall stacks of these objects and just laughed to myself that I was permitted me to do that.
Getting to create a beautiful island utopia is most evident in Tranquil Isle’s Sandbox Mode, which lifts the limits of building space requirements and allows players to run free. I could put ten town halls on one island, or make an island that’s full of taverns and theatres, surrounded by houses so the townspeople could access them. There’s a world full of combinations of buildings, decorations, and terrain forms that can make Sandbox mode a joy to explore.
My only issue with Tranquil Isle come from the eventual end to these building experiences. While I can begin lots of new islands to create lots of different potential towns, it always feels like the building process ends too abruptly.
For example, a “medium” sized town will have three different islands to populate and build upon, but once the player runs out of buildings to build, the game forces them to end. Every time I’d place my last building, I was given the option to build a bridge to a new island… that didn’t exist.
I wish Tranquil Isle would give players a greater sense of closure when they were clearly finished with the space at hand, or build out some objectives for the player to complete when they were actually done. However, with tons of combinations of buildings, decorations, and island constructions, players can get nearly infinite replayability out of this title’s solid foundation, chill vibes, and potential.
Rating: 6.5 out of 10
Buy Tranquil Isle – PC
Disclosures: This game is developed by Tom Daly and published by Future Friends Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 2.5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB, but it contains no violence, graphic imagery or language.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no dialogue, and the only bits of text are in pop-ups on the screen. The text can be resized by a “UI Slider” in the game’s settings. The game is fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable.
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