Buildings Have Feelings Too
I really enjoy city builders and the process of turning a barren space into one full of life and verve. There’s something incredibly satisfying about seeing something blossom, and being able to point to it later and say “I made this.” I say all this, because Buildings Have Feelings Too!, despite being about cities and buildings, isn’t really a city builder. If anything, it’s a gentrification simulator.
This is a very polite building.
Buildings Have Feelings Too! is a puzzle game. You play as an old hotel, helping develop neighbourhoods to give the buildings in them new leases on life. The buildings have likes and dislikes, requirements to upgrade, and a whole set of potential paths each of their constituent businesses could undertake. It’s fundamentally a puzzle game, all about figuring out how best to place the various puzzle pieces you are given to achieve the task at hand.
That building likes yelling.
The game it most closely resembles is Reus, and while that game focuses on life on a planet, the idea of optimising surrounding conditions to create an ideal for a particular individual is still a good one. It works really well here. Though the requirements are sometimes a little arcane, and the process of rearranging buildings can sometimes be a bit tedious, the underlying idea is solid and solidly executed. The various challenges for each neighbourhood are unique, and provide new ways to explore the pieces you’ve been given and find new images to be made with those same puzzle pieces.
True, but…
The issues come in when one starts to really think about what they’re doing and what the game is saying about cities. As buildings are rearranged to improve their constituent businesses, various businesses are sacrificed to improve whatever the target upgradable business is. Buildings are demolished, and new ones built, all in the name of that end vision of what the business should be. In the above screenshot, orphanages are wiped out to make space for a thriving financial district. In another level, industrial chimneys are intentionally set up to fail.
Here’s the rub. When you establish as your premise that buildings have feelings, and that it is the wellbeing of the buildings that the player ought to care about, sacrificing some for the good of the group starts wandering into ethical grey areas. If we think of buildings as people, then there is an uncomfortable casual sociopathy to killing some so others can become obscenely wealthy.
In other words, gentrification still becomes unethical even when you’re looking at it from the buildings’ perspective.
The game is full of cute art and fun writing, but if the idea at the heart of the game - that a neighbourhood must be gentrified and developed if it is to survive - is fundamentally not tenable, then it’s hard for the game itself to succeed. As fun as it is to delicately arrange the buildings and watch them grow, there comes a point where that realisation kicks in and the game sours.
I enjoyed Buildings Have Feelings Too! for much of my playtime. It’s exactly the type of puzzle I find cathartic and fun. I don’t think I’m likely to pick it back up again, though, specifically because its underlying idea isn’t one I can stomach. If buildings have feelings, then they have the right not to be sacrificed before the altar of progress. Respect buildings’ feelings too.
Developer: Blackstaff Games
Genre: Strategy, Puzzle
Year: 2021
Country: Northern Ireland
Language: English
Play Time: 9 Hours