Spooky season is once again nearly upon us, and for most of us that means watching lots of scary movies and playing lots of scary games. Not everyone is so fearless and cool though, and it’s understandable if they still want to join in the Halloween fun. October isn’t just a month for soiling your knickers, it’s a month to have fun with pumpkins, skeleton decorations and garish witch costumes. Monsters don’t have to be scary, they can be friends too. These friendly fiends need somewhere to settle down after a hard night of scaring, and they couldn’t do much better than Fangtopia.
The demo I played to preview Fangtopia was pretty small, but showed off how the game works and was undoubtedly compelling. In Fangtopia you’re building an island nation for spooky monsters, who all have names like Wily Werewolf and Sally Scarecrow. To do this you need to place hexagon shaped tiles, and you’re rewarded with points when these tiles match. Some tiles are split in half and can be rotated so you can match both the bits on them (ie mountain and city) and the points will continue rolling in.
After a while your first werewolf resident will want to stay with you, and to show them that Fangtopia is a nice home you’ll need to spread four forest tiles around them. When you succeed in doing that the wolf will move in, and more importantly grant you a tree tile whenever you decide you need it. This is important because usually the tiles come in at random, and because you only have a set amount before you get a game over.
This looming threat is less threatening than it sounds though, because there are plenty of ways to gain tiles. The most efficient of them is by placing unique landmarks, which you’ll need to surround by specific tiles to activate. Volcanos like to be around mountains, farms like to be around wheat fields, and you probably get the general idea. In the ten minute sessions the demo allowed I never ran out of tiles, but when chasing higher scores in the full game I’m sure it’ll be very possible to use them all.
There were two game modes in the Fangtopia demo to try out, a more standard mode and an island focused one. In this mode multiple small islands with train tracks spawned across the map, and by joining them together with more tracks it was even easier to score masses of points. The game itself didn’t honestly change much in this mode, but watching a ghost train choo choo about was very charming.
Although it was relatively simple and incredibly bite sized, I did have fun playing the Fangtopia demo build. A lot of this was down to the charm of this world, which has a real “Halloween display at your local store” vibe. It’s child friendly, colourful, and just a delight to look at. Creating bigger islands with more residents is sure to add to the charm more too.
Fangtopia blends cosy and spooky in a way few games do, and it’s really satisfying to build a monster island out of hexagons. In the demo build there wasn’t a whole lot of brain power required to succeed, and it’ll be interesting to see if that remains the case in the full game.
Fangtopia is coming to PC via Steam on October 28th. There is a demo available now.
