Teeny Tiny Town review - "Land plotting with puzzling"

Architecture and city planning may not be the most glamorous positions, but they do have a lot of influence on the layout and appearance of towns and cities. Short Circuit Studio is giving players a chance to experience this in a streamlined sort of way with Teeny Tiny Town.

This isometric 3D puzzle game is about arranging tiles in a certain way to combine them and gain resources. The more things you combine, the more things you can make with the goal being to create towns on various plots of land. Just like with actual building placement, it'll require thoughtfulness and planning.

What is Teeny Tiny Town?

Some puzzle games are so small and clear that they don't really need a plot to drive them forward - they just need to give problems to solve. Teeny Tiny Town has no epic story, but that doesn't mean there isn't one that could be secretly happening in the background. In a universe where lands have been separated into floating grids in a peaceful void, there is still no society or infrastructure. Thankfully, as a deity of some kind, you have the power to occupy tiles with objects and combine them with adjacent objects of the same kind. You must use these powers while you have them on each island to make as many homes as possible.

Quality Living in Teeny Tiny Town

Where you live is one of the biggest decisions that you'll ever make in life, so you want to make sure you consider everything carefully. Teeny Tiny Town has considered a lot to create pleasant and interesting locations. It captures the effective puzzle feel that can be found in games like Tetris but with much less pressure. The puzzles have the appearance of simplicity, but if you start mindlessly tapping around, you'll find yourself trapped in a corner. It gives you all the information and time you need so you can learn to make every single move count. Every single combination you make feels like an achievement.

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The sheer variety of puzzles right from the get-go is extremely generous. You can start on grids of various sizes and layouts to test the limits of your puzzling process. Though the different sizes present their own degree of challenge, it's the tiles themselves that pose the real challenge. Things like bodies of water, available space, and combinations already in place all feed into creating their own levels of difficulty. Which puzzles are easy and which ones are hard is subjective, entirely based on you which is just another reason to try them all out.

Downsides to Teeny Tiny Town

The smaller a game is, the bigger some of the problems stand out. Although Teeny Tiny Town is solid overall, there are cracks in the foundation. The most noticeable crack is the monotony in puzzle piece generation. The RNG seems to love giving you tons and tons of bushes, even on the smaller maps which will quickly eat up a lot of space. It's never clear what's going to be available for you to place, which can definitely work against whatever strategy you have in mind. As a result, some of the puzzles can seem boring or annoying as you just want to place things and get rid of them in the hopes of just getting something different. While the powerups may provide options, they're few and far between on top of being expensive.

Moving to Teeny Tiny Town

Teeny Tiny Town is a 3D isometric puzzle game about combining resources on tiles to make as many buildings as possible with a set number of moves. It's a peaceful atmosphere that's challenging enough to really test your thinking. The problems arise with the serious repetition of the same kinds of resources so frequently and not many moves to work with overall. Barring that, Teeny Tiny Town would probably be a nice place to call home.