The idle game genre is full of adorable, cosy, sprite-filled games, but I have been on a quest for something more. In a sea of Steam releases, we’ve found Rusty’s Retirement and Maltese’s Fluffy Onsen, but still my search continues. Which is when I found Gourdlets.
Promising Pixels
Gourdlets are cute and tiny little pixel creatures with lots of potential inside them. They wander around your village, interacting with objects and gaining experience. As they gain experience, they will level up, giving up points towards unlocking new objects.
This is the main goal of Gourdlets. Build your village, and watch your Gourdlets grow. There are no limitations on the number of objects you can place, and you can even open up buildings to decorate the interior as well. With well over one hundred objects with different colour pallets to choose from, there’s plenty of room for creativity.
Their pixel design is super cute, and the simplicity makes Gourdlets the perfect game to sit at the bottom of your screen or on a second monitor while you work.
Controls
Using a mouse and keyboard, you can easily click and place the objects and flooring you want onto the grid. Shortcuts are linked to all the buttons on the number pad, and you can move the camera around using WASD. Demolishing things was also pretty easy and you can use Ctrl+Z to undo anything you didn’t intend to make or destroy.
I liked that you could scroll in and out to get a really good look at all the details. It was also pretty cool to have the ability to rotate the map. Although I did notice a few sprites didn’t rotate properly, so I had some objects that liked to spin with the camera. I doubt many people would notice them, though.
The Perfect Study Buddy
Your Gourdlets are quite happy to bumble around the map without any input and only really need checking in every ten to twenty minutes if you have a lot of them. The accompanying music and ambience were also relaxing and lent themselves to a working environment, boosting my productivity. This meant that I could check in on my Gourdlets between tasks and level them up as a reward for myself.
There are also multiple ways to customize the experience. You’re able to set the music and sound effects for each building as well as which Gourdlets are allowed in there.
Collect Your Chat
Twitch integration is something I was looking for, but was not readily featured on Gourdlet’s Steam page. This should be rectified, as I would have bought it even faster had it been there. There were other integrations too, but I didn’t recognise them.
This integration allows your chat to join the village as a Gourdlet. Their name can be shown on stream, and you can use the customisation settings to give your chatters their own colour and accessory. The options for this were pretty impressive, and we had a lot of fun with it.
The Simple Stuff
The problem I tend to have with idle games is a lack of direction for progression within the game. Watching your village grow sure feels like progression, but there was nothing I could personally do to encourage the growth of my Gourdlets, as there’s nothing to hinder progress in any way. I can pop up houses and decorate them to my heart’s content, but they would grow all the same in a shed filled with random drops.
I hate to admit it, but I think I had more fun with Gourdlets playing on stream than I did on my own. Being able to make a house for your chatters and build around the themes they chose added this challenge element that is otherwise lacking. I realise that adding features like this then leads to feature creep and is antithetical to the aim of an idle game, but I needed something more.
Conclusion
Gourdlets is a great companion game. The ability to change the screen to sit along your taskbar or go full-screen is really handy, and it achieves everything it sets out to do well. I think I am just too goal-oriented to keep going back.
I ran out of steam with it pretty quickly once I had built up an initial block of houses and decorated them. By this point, I had unlocked maybe a third of the objective items and pretty much left it running for the next few days while I waited for my Gourdlets to mature. I think I might have gotten more out of it if there were more themes within the items as opposed to relying on colour swapping the same three variations of similar items. Although I don’t want to diminish the number of items, as most have animations when interacting with Gourdlets.
I enjoyed the train arriving to drop off the Gourdlets and the items – the wee train noises are adorable. I also left the game running for hours while casually chilling to the soundtrack without meaning to. Gourdlets won’t have enough gameplay elements for some, but it is a wonderful, cosy, idle game.
Platforms: PC
DEVELOPER: AuntyGames
PUBLISHER: Future Friends Games, AuntyGames
Played on: Steam
About the Author
