Cutout Village is a cozy papercraft game you can actually build
Other than video games, my main hobby is crafting. I love anything that lets me create something, from painting to jewelry making. That’s a love my daughter has inherited, so we’re always doing something crafty in this house, and now Cutout Village is bridging the gap between games and crafts with (mostly) virtual papercraft.
Cutout Village, by Devilish Games (who also made Cloudgazer), is a virtual town restoration game where you rebuild the town by cutting and sticking paper models of buildings, decorations, and fruit trees. It’s an undeniably cozy experience that will keep you playing for “just one more model,” and it can even make the jump from the virtual world into the real one if you let it.
Fruitfully cozy
Cutout Village starts with a dog and a cat venturing to a village that can’t even be described as “rundown”, because it’s little more than a pile of crumpled paper and dirt. Using fruit grown on paper fruit trees that you cut out and "plant" yourself, you gradually begin to add buildings, which attract new residents and visitors.
The entire premise is possibly the coziest thing I’ve experienced in a long time. There’s no strife or drama to hinder progress, no friendships to maintain, and no overly hard-to-gather resources necessary for building. You only need fruit, which seems to grow almost every time you erect a new building and you're never left waiting very long for the fruit you need.
Different buildings require different fruit and a certain number of residents or visitors, but it’s fairly easy to meet requirements as long as you’re putting down all of the available decorations as you unlock them. Decorations bring visitors, while most buildings, except those with a specific purpose (grocery store, bakery, bar, pharmacy, etc.), will add to the number of residents who call this reviving village home, while also adding to the visitor count.
Escaping the game
For most players, I’m confident in saying that Cutout Village will remain very much a delightfully cozy screen-based game, but the appeal goes so much further than that for particularly crafty types and parents like me.
Look, the number of games I can’t play without my six-year-old taking over is rapidly increasing, and Cutout Village is a firm favorite in this house. While I could go on for hours about the gorgeous hand-drawn art style and the weirdly satisfying mechanic of snipping and sticking, what I love most about Cutout Village is the fact that it doesn’t need to stay in the virtual world.
Every time you complete a building in the game, you also unlock a downloadable PDF of the model that can be printed out and stuck together in the real world. That means that I can complete a building in Cutout Village, print it out on card stock for Shortstack, and let her go to town with the glue and safety scissors. Between us, we’ve got virtual and real-world versions of this village in the works, and I can’t think of another game that’s given us quite the same experience.
If you want the models without waiting until you’ve completed the game, you can also get the Cutout Village series of books on Amazon, although that does take away some of the satisfaction that comes with unlocking them individually.
I can stop whenever I like
If we’re being totally honest, I had a hard time tearing myself away from Cutout Village to come and write about my experience playing it. Every time I started on a new building, I’d say it was the last one, but then the fruit would finish growing, and I’d suddenly have enough to build another house. Just one more building turned into completing the second section and constructing the bridge to the third, and I’m already itching to go back and do more.
It really doesn’t help (or does, depending on how long you want to keep playing) that the buildings get more and more complicated as you progress. The early buildings are all straight lines and right angles, but past the second section, you suddenly have more complex and interesting designs to piece together. Every building is filled with hand-drawn details that make you slow down and take your time putting it together.
Cutout Village has so much charm that it’s hard to really describe, but it’s also something so much more than that. It’s a throwback to a time when I wasn’t glued to a screen for most of the day and had all the time in the world to build paper models. It’s also a lovely break from the stress of everyday life, and I can see myself pouring hours into it, either in-game or with my daughter and the PDF printouts.
If you want to experience the magic that is Cutout Village for yourself, you don’t have long to wait; the game will be released on October 21, 2026, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves cozy games or longs for the simpler days when paper models were the height of technology.
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