Buildings Have Feelings Too! Review

There’s something so satisfying about building something huge. From model trains to ships in bottles, the act of turning a pile of random pieces into a complex structure is an achievement. The same goes for management sims where you’re trying to build a family, society, farm, or whatever else people spend their lives working towards. However, you’re so focused on managing the little drones that do all the actual building that you never think about the buildings themselves. Well, in Buildings Have Feelings Too! that’s all you do. It’s not just about growing an urban metropolis but about keeping it happy too.

Making a Plot

The thing about management games is that they rarely put an emphasis on the story. This is because it’s up to us to make it our own and come up with a personal goal. Whenever there is a narrative in these types of games it’s usually just a framing device. A device that provides a reason for events or hurdles to break things up now and then. With Buildings Have Feelings Too!, the frame is simple but solid enough. You are a nameless building that ditches their last city for a new one on the ropes. After quickly befriending the few structures that remain, you received the task of revitalizing the city street by street. A noble endeavor that’ll definitely take time and patience.

Good Infrastructure

If a building much less a city is to survive the amorphous tidal wave of time they need quality infrastructure. To put it simply, “infrastructure” is what keeps things from falling down. It’s something we don’t frequently think about but if we do it right then we never have to worry about it. Buildings Have Feelings Too! does a number of things right with the first being its charm. The novelty of controlling and interacting with sentient buildings is both pleasant and interesting. They all have a variety of personalities and things becoming the biggest source of color to the dreary backdrop. The sound of bricks and stone mashing as you trundle around with buildings in tow is just the glaze on walls.

The next thing is the degree of challenge. Despite how much the buildings have to say, their happiness is quite delicate. Each type of building has different outputs, both positive and negative, as well as an overall appeal rating. In order to raise the overall appeal of an area, each building needs to have their needs met. You do this by arranging them in a way so that everyone is happy. This can be quite difficult with little free space and the fact that unhappy buildings close and collapse rapidly. For a building, you’ve got to be quite active and mobile.

Problem Areas

All it takes is one leak or rotten wooden beam to bring a whole structure crashing down. In Buildings Have Feelings Too! they may need to call an inspector to have a look. A point they need to look at is the tedious nature. The benefit of most management games is being able to perch on high and sweep whole areas with a wave of your hand. In this game, your omniscient hand becomes a pair of tweezers. You can only move buildings around one at a time and only to spots that have sufficient space. Considering how fast buildings deteriorate when just one is out of place, this trudging moving mechanic just adds unnecessary difficulty.

The other main issue is deciding to call itself a “management” game. You do need to build new buildings and make sure they’re all happy but it’s more akin to a puzzle game. The buildings are talkative pieces that need to be in the right place to form a whole picture. Rather than trying to build towards something, you’re just achieving small tasks as time goes on. These tasks are the only way to unlock new buildings and areas and you simply move from location to location. Once an area is happy, there’s very little to revisit unless you get desperate for extra pieces.

The Build-up

Buildings Have Feelings Too! Is an upcoming puzzle-management game by Blackstaff Games. It’s going to be released on pretty much anything that has buttons or a controller. Taking control of a sentient building, you must bring happiness to other buildings by rebuilding and building anew. It’s a charming if somewhat tedious challenge with some nice aesthetics. Despite how fickle these buildings can be, they’re still quite structured.

TechRaptor reviewed Buildings Have Feelings Too! on Steam with a copy provided by the crew behind the game. It is also available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.