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I don’t think anyone on Earth has purchased SubaraCity except for me. Well, that’s not true - there are fourteen reviews on Steam. Some of which mention that there’s a game-breaking bug that can happen at the beginning of a run.
Do I know if that’s true? I don’t! Because I own it on Switch! Weeee!
Hopefully they fixed it, because SubaraCity is squarely in the genre of “exactly worth the five dollars it costs.” It’s a puzzle game with a city building theme. That already is catnip for me. I love games that give me the illusion of building a complex world while I’m actually just matching colors like a child. Inject it right into my veins.
Here’s the gameplay loop: You’re given tracks of land with buildings on them. The different tracks of land are different colors - brown, green, a slightly different green, etc. If areas of the same color are touching each other, you can click to combine them into one block - causing the remaining building on the land to grow and earn more points. You keep doing this until the buildings turn into skyscrapers that can only be combined with each other into bigger skyscrapers.
As usual, I’m bad at explaining these rules. Just imagine a puzzle game. Great. You get it.
The real value of SubaraCity is that it’s relaxing. Really relaxing. The music is quiet, calming, and - weirdly - sometimes melancholic? The gameplay itself isn’t complicated, and chance plays a big part in whether your run lasts long or not. It’s just… easy? Simple? It’s a gentle puzzle game with no timer. There’s no intense music. Hell, when you lose, you get a cute little fanfare sound.
There aren’t a lot of truly relaxing games out there. Certainly there are games with chill vibes, but few that actually lean completely into giving you a minute of fucking peace in your life.
SubaraCity gives me that minute of peace. For five dollars.