I’ve made no secret of my love for pixel art or my enthusiasm for crafting-heavy survival games. And whenever those two things are combined, I’m interested in seeing the result. The latest game on my pixel-art crafting radar is Tinkertown, which has been in Early Access since late last year.
A lot of the usual crafting/survival suspects are present in Tinkertown, like workbenches and forges, the ability to build your own house or castle, and plenty of baddies to bash. There are tools to build and resources to collect, dungeons to explore and trees to chop down. It’s all standard stuff. But the tilt-shifted pixel-art aesthetic is what really gets me. I really love this art style.
Oh, and the music is fantastic.
Thinkertown was reportedly a little bit light on content when it first landed in Early Access, but it’s been getting substantial updates on an almost-monthly basis. The Early Access roadmap is startlingly ambitious, but developer (and publisher) Headup has been moving along at a rapid clip, realizing and enhancing the true potential of Tinkertown.
Since the Early Access rollout last December, Headup has already beefed up character creation, implemented multiplayer, added farming and fishing, updated housing, and sanded off rough edges with substantial quality-of-life upgrades. And the content just keeps coming.
If you want to get into Tinkertown, I think now is a pretty good time to do so. It’s early enough to get a head start (since version 1.0 is still off in the distant future), and late enough that many of the early-development wrinkles have been ironed out. There’s a good chunk of content here, though it shouldn’t overwhelm new players, and at the core of it all is a really solid and engaging crafting game.
What are you waiting for?
You can check out the announcement trailer for Tinkertown below.
