The thrill of city-building games — from blocked sewers to rewilding

I should have learned by now that I am a terrible mayor. I start every new game on Cities: Skylines with the best intentions, convinced that this time my city will be organised, eco-friendly and welcoming. Somehow it always goes wrong. Before I know it, the sewage pipes are backing up and everyone is sick. The local playground has been burning for a week but I can’t afford firefighters. My office falls into crippling debt. Residents leave in droves.

I first discovered the joys of mismanaging civic infrastructure when I spent long teenage afternoons with SimCity, the original city-building game, which casts the player in a role somewhere between mayor, urban planner and minor deity. You gaze down upon blank terrain and construct roads and neighbourhoods, all while balancing budgets with the needs of your tiny residents. The first SimCity (1989) launched a genre and spawned an array of classical-themed imitators including Caesar, Zeus: Master of Olympus and Pharaoh, for those who wanted to swap skyscrapers for bathhouses.

Being a real-life city planner sounds both complex and stressful. So why is it so much fun in game form? It didn’t take long to remember the appeal when I returned to Cities: Skylines, a modern SimCity successor. City-building games are unusual in not setting specific goals, instead encouraging players to think creatively and experiment with the urban simulation. Balancing resources and attending to citizens’ diverse needs becomes a satisfying puzzle. It offers something of the model railway’s appeal: watching a system you’ve constructed run smoothly.

These games are love letters to the urban American sprawl

While upgrading my city, I often found myself gutting older residential neighbourhoods to make way for new commercial districts or tearing down schools to widen roads. Unwittingly, I was becoming a one-man gentrification machine. This wasn’t entirely my fault. These games are billed as free sandboxes to model our dream cities, but they promote a very specific ideology of urban design. The most effective city is one that is perpetually expanding, preferably organised on a grid. These games are love letters to the urban American sprawl.

In recent years, there has been a refreshing diversification in city-builders. In the satirical world of Tropico you play El Presidente, who rules his banana republic with an iron fist, managing propaganda and selecting which citizens to “disappear” next. Anno 2070 and Surviving Mars explore cities of the future, while the harrowing Frostpunk asks you to save the last human settlement on a post-apocalyptic Earth frozen in eternal winter.

These games can be complex, but the indie world provides approachable titles too. Mini Metro and Mini Motorways are addictive puzzle games about transport that boast elegant graphic design while new release Dorfromantik asks players to arrange terrain tiles of forest, village, railway and river in a soothing exercise not unlike a jigsaw. Most charming is Townscaper, more toy than game, which gives you a simple tool to create pastel-shaded buildings that sprout spires, archways and gabled roofs depending on where you click.

The most troublesome aspect of SimCity and Cities: Skylines is their approach to the environment — nature is nothing more than a resource to be plundered. Some city-builders offer alternative perspectives. The forthcoming Terra Nil is a rewilding game in which you use ecological principles to spread riotous greenery over a brown wasteland. Timberborn is set in a post-human world where sentient beavers engineer societies and naturally look adorable chopping down lumber with their little teeth.

Meanwhile political game-maker Paolo Pedercini’s Lichenia operates like a commentary on all the rest. You must restore a polluted wasteland to health, but it is unclear exactly how your actions impact the environment. The game revels in obscurity, stripping the player of their illusions of control and mastery. In doing so, Pedercini questions how humans have built upon the world, and how we reflect these ideas in our games. A haunting monologue runs along the screen as you play, at one point asking: “Were we just building more ruins all along?”