
You’ve heard of tree huggers. Now get ready for…building huggers
Source: Merge Games
Developed by Blackstaff Games and published by Merge (the folks behind Frostpunk, Cloudpunk, and many other indies), Buildings Have Feelings Too! has now released on Steam. A far cry from the big bads of management games like Age of Empires, Buildings Have Feelings Too! is a beautifully styled city-management/puzzle game where you take on the role of a lone little building helping breath new life into its surrounding neighborhoods.
Buildings Have Feelings Too! taps into a problem that most buildings must eventually face — becoming irrelevant. Not every building can be the Parthenon or the Great Pyramids, withstanding the test of time and reinventing themselves for the modern era. No, for the majority of buildings in this world, like warehouses, crumbling tenements, and mills, the ability to adapt can be an insurmountable task. And those that fail to adapt, get demolished.
This is how Buildings Have Feelings Too! sets its premise, with a small gathering of buildings down by the docks as they say goodbye to a friend who is mere moments away from the wrecking ball. Unable to move on from its original purpose, the stoic docks warehouse accepts its fate and goes to a grave of rubble. It’s a pretty grim scene, but this tragic fate gives our “protagonist,” who I’ll just call Little Building, the motivation to start helping others reinvent themselves.

Buildings Have Feelings Too!
The Good
- Many neighborhoods to unlock, each with their own objectives and aesthetic
- Balancing the competing needs of your borough’s denizens provides a good amount of depth and challenge
- Catchy soundtrack and cute, picture-book look
The Bad
- Tutorials are sometimes vague
- Can feel lost when trying to complete certain objectives
- Relatively short if you’re only meeting the minimums to progress
Buildings Have Feelings Too!: The Good
Source: Windows Central
Category | Buildings Have Feelings Too! |
---|---|
Title | Buildings Have Feelings Too! |
Developer | Blackstaff Games |
Publisher | Merge Games |
Genre | City management/puzzle |
Minimum Requirements | Windows 7 or later, 2GB RAM |
Game Size | 1GB |
Play Time | 10+ hours |
Players | Single Player |
Launch Price | $19.99 |
Let’s say you’re trying to create a financial district. First, you’re going to need a couple of accounting firms. Once you’ve got your accountancies in place, you’ll need to upgrade them by providing nearby resources for them to draw on. After all, even accountants need to eat, so you’ll likely need a couple of cafes and some family housing to round out the block.
Figuring out how to place buildings in proximity to complementary businesses is where the real puzzle lies
Your objectives often determine which businesses you’ll need and only certain building types have the proper permits to house specific businesses. You wouldn’t build a warehouse to act as family housing, but you would use a residence building for just such a purpose. Once you’ve got your businesses in place, you then use informational attribute and appeal cards to determine what types of other establishments complement, or potentially hurt, the other business around them. Businesses will be affected only by those that are within a set range of spaces to themselves, so figuring out how to place your buildings in proximity to the right attributes is a huge piece of the puzzle here.
This balancing act can occasionally be frustrating, but by constructing, repurposing, demolishing, and even taking a building by the hand, you’ll find that your districts start to take shape and fall into proper alignment. As you start to learn attributes and upgrade paths by heart, the speed of the game really starts to pick up, too.
Buildings Have Feelings Too!: The Bad
Source: Merge Games
It was bad enough that I actually started a new file, as I couldn’t see a way out of the corner I’d backed myself into. The root of the problem here, at least in my opinion, is that the tutorial explains the state of “disrepair” in a confusing way. As I now understand it thanks to my second file, buildings that are placed in a spot that is too disadvantageous for them (near too much pollution or a rowdy pub, for example) will start to fall into disrepair. An alarming red circle will appear above the afflicted building, indicating that it’s about to go under. If the red circle fills up before you’re able to resolve whatever the problem is, the building will be unsalvagable and will close down.
The tutorials can be vague and occasionally don’t come up in time for you to avoid certain problems.
You then need to either demolish this building entirely or repair it. Depending on the building type, repairs may be cheap or they could be pretty pricey. In my case, I couldn’t figure out what the red circle even meant (I was encountering the state of disrepair before the tutorial got around to explaining it) or how I could fix it. In a panic, I got caught in a cycle of “building closes down, pay to repair it, it closes down again, more repair cost” and on and on until I just ran out of resources to keep going.
The game’s tutorials are a bit opaque and sometimes simply don’t pop up at a time when you actually need them. This could easily just be a “Me Problem™” though, so take this with a grain of salt. You may play through the initial stages and have no such issues like I did, so don’t let my tale of woe stop you from giving Buildings Have Feelings Too! a try.
Buildings Have Feelings Too!: Should you play it?
Source: Windows Central
If you’re the kind of gamer that likes city management, urban planning, and/or puzzle games, you’ll probably find something to like with Buildings Have Feelings Too! This indie is easy on the PC and would run well on most decent laptops on the market right now. It has a pleasing aesthetic, fun concept, and solid gameplay once you get the hang of it. With objectives for each area, plenty of room to improve and optimize each neighborhood, and achievements through Steam, you could easily surpass the 8-10 estimated minimum hours of playtime.
I found that, after my first snafu, I was spending about an hour per district messing around and getting things into a passable state. Perfection would likely take me much longer than that. There’s a good variety of districts that you can unlock, world events to shake things up, and progressing eras of time that you can eventually work your way through. In short, Buildings Have Feelings Too! is a solid indie experience and I would recommend it to those who love to micromanage and fine-tune their setups.