Town to City: An off-the-grid city builder that’s dripping in cozy charm

If I’m being honest, I usually struggle to truly enjoy city-building games. There’s too much emphasis on forward planning, and the necessity to mentally be 10 steps ahead of what you’re actually doing is just too much pressure for my brain to handle. Town to City is a city-building game that could have found the recipe to keep me playing. 

Town to City, developed by Galaxy Grove, is a pixelated city builder that manages to feel fresh while retaining the tried-and-tested favorite features of the genre. While there are definitely frustrations that arise in the expansion process, there’s something utterly charming about both the art style and the gameplay that keeps me coming back. 

Off the grid living, from the ground up

If you’ve ever played a city builder, you’ll know precisely how this works: You start with an empty area of land and fill it with basic housing and amenities, gradually increasing the scale of the settlement and the productivity of the residents, until you eventually end up with a thriving metropolis. 

Town to City follows this predictable path. Newcomers arrive via the nearby train station; you put them into houses that suit their wants and needs, and they get to work in whichever shops or amenities you’ve already placed. Unlocking new buildings is done by staffing the research center, which earns you points to purchase upgrades and additions.

One of the major things that I struggle with in many city builders is the grid system, with everything being set out in straight lines and right angles. That’s one thing that Town to City noticeably strays away from, allowing you to place any building at any angle in any location, and roads are simply drawn onto the terrain as if you’re using a pen. 

It really is a huge improvement on those regimented straight lines of other city builders, allowing you to design and lay out incredibly intricate cities that are each unique in their own ways, with spectacular city plazas and sweeping neighborhoods where residents make their homes.

Town to City does an excellent job of easing you into things gently. The first groups of newly arrived families are happy with whatever house you choose for them, and they tend to remain happy regardless of what you do. However, I quickly learned not to run before I could walk, because as soon as you start to upgrade the status of your community, the trouble comes.

The bigger the town, the bigger the problems

As you start to get more residents and you upgrade your town’s status, you quickly realize that you’re going to be spinning a lot of plates to keep everyone happy. Each resident wants particular things around them, their houses decorated in a certain way, access to specific types of businesses, and a house that fits their desires. You even have specific requests to complete once you’ve unlocked the town hall.

Some people want to be near water, others want to be close to entertainment, while some specify that they want a lot of decorative lighting around their new home. You have to make quick decisions on which family gets which house, and if they’re unhappy with your choice, it takes the average happiness down for the entire town. 

I learned a lesson during my first playthrough: Turn away people you cannot please with your current setup. While trying to please everyone who shows up might seem like the right thing to do when it comes to growing your population, turning away families who want specific things you don’t yet have will only improve your overall happiness level. New families come incredibly regularly, so there’s always someone with different requirements who will be grateful for the housing you provide. 

By my third attempt, I got pretty good at keeping the regular people happy, aside from the town’s required ‘grumpy old man’ who was never happy, regardless of what I did. I didn’t face my first major problem as a leader until the artisans started moving in, and I found it next to impossible to make their homes ‘luxurious’ enough to keep them happy. I’m still baffled as to how I’m supposed to make them happy, but you can’t please everyone, I suppose.

I’m bad at farming

Once you’ve progressed to a small town on the first map and unlocked those pesky artisans, you’ll be able to travel to the second map and start your own farm. I was excited for this, but I quickly realized that this was going to be far more complicated than I originally anticipated. 

For the most part, this farm map is pretty similar to the first basic town map, except you have to keep your farmers above 60% happiness or they’ll stop doing their work. Despite keeping my farmers above 60%, and having the necessary buildings nearby to facilitate the harvesting of my grapes, nothing happened. They harvested nothing, which means I earned no farm points, which means I could unlock no more crops. 

I’m wholly open to admitting that I probably did something wrong or missed a tooltip somewhere along the way. As I said, city builders aren’t exactly my speciality. With that in mind, I opened up the handy encyclopedia and started trying to find out where I’d gone wrong and why my farmers were seemingly on strike. Turns out I needed a winery, and honestly, that’s a sentiment I can get on board with.

Trial and error

If you want some advice, it would be not to take things too seriously when you go into your first playthrough. Going into any city builder is a massive learning curve, and Town to City is no different, despite the slow increase in difficulty. Plonk your houses down wherever you want, make pretty designs, and learn from the many mistakes you’re almost guaranteed to make. 

Then, with a little more understanding under your belt, you can start a new town (don’t worry, each attempt becomes a separate save file) and plan according to what you know is coming. There’s so much charm to Town to City that it’s easy to replay those initial stages of expanding your town, with those pesky requests and requirements being all the more enjoyable while you build up to the more frustrating challenges that come later. 

Or, if you want a fully cozy and relaxing experience, I urge you to try the Sandbox mode. You can choose your map, tweak the settings to remove any and all obstacles (money, build times, happiness levels, etc), and generally live out your mayoral dreams in a town of your own off-the-grid design. You won’t get any achievements this way, but you can just relax and build to your heart's content.

Town to City is set for release on PC via Steam on September 16, 2025, and it’s an absolute gem for anyone who loves city builders but craves more freedom over building placement and control. Despite the frustrations of being mayor, it’s difficult not to love those little pixelated residents.