8 Best Aesthetic City Builders for Relaxing, Creative Fun in 2025
Are you someone who plays city building games but has more fun just building the town and watching the citizens go about their daily lives.
I certainly am. I started this gameplay style all the way back with a game called Stronghold Crusader. The game was an RTS with intense castle on castle combat between dueling rulers. I loved the game for a different reason though. Compared to other RTS games of the time Stronghold Crusader had a strange fascination with simulating the peasants in your castle.
Farmers would take their crops by hand to the stockpile. Millers picked up their own wheat for grinding, and the resulting flower had to be delivered by the same miller. Likewise, each profession had its own lovingly crafted 3D animation featuring each worker doing their job.
I spent afternoons watching my townspeople going about their business navigating the crazy streets I had designed for them.
I loved the simulation, but I also enjoyed the feeling of building my own creation artistically without the pressure of strict game mechanics forcing me to conform to a style of play.
Whether or not that qualifies as a game is open for debate, but what we can all agree on is that there is something fun about building a digital diorama for the sake of creation itself.
A genre has begun to form around the aforementioned ethos, and luckily there’s a ton of options for every flavor of universe you can imagine. Some with very light goals, and some with no goals other than creation itself.
Here’s my list of the top Aesthetic City Building Game that you can play.
Cloud Gardens
Admittedly I haven’t played this one, but it’s been on my wishlist for a long time. This is more of a plant growing simulator than a city builder, but the visual aesthetics are a real treat. I definitely recommend giving it a shot.
Tiny Glade
No list of chill city builders would be complete without Tiny Glade. Tiny Glade is the most popular and polished chill city builder on the market right now. It features a procedural generation system for buildings that makes every piece fit perfectly. This system also spices things up by having building pieces change visually depending on their location, size, and proximity to other pieces. There are a ton of customizations to find simply by messing around, and you could spend hours building your dream castle.
Dystopika
Similar to Tiny Glade, Dystopika is cut from the same cloth with a cyberpunk twist. The game has amazing visuals and a fantastic soundtrack to create the perfect dystopia to vibe to. The game doesn’t quite give you the same level of deep customization, but it’s still fun nonetheless.
Islanders
The first entry on the with a discreet goal. Islanders when compared to Tiny Glade and Dystopika is more of a puzzle game. The idea is built around building little towns that satisfy a points system which allows you to keep building. Still very chill, and a lot of fun buildings to mess around with and discover.
SUMMERHOUSE
Summerhouse is a 2D pixel art version of Tiny Glade or Dystopika. If there’s a theme with all these games, it’s that they all have amazing visuals. Summer House doesn't let us down here with some of the best pixel art I’ve seen in a while. It has all the same mechanics that I mentioned in Tiny Glade and is a fantastic town diorama builder.
Townscaper
Townscaper gets a special mention because it created the genre. Townscaper was indeed the first modern game to fully take advantage of creation for creation sake. It pioneered the use of procedural generation for complexity that every game uses up until now. In townscaper you are only allowed to put down and delete ground or buildings. Thanks to the complex system of interactions the more creative you are with these simple mechanics the more unique buildings piece you will discover.
Terra Nil
Terra Nil is another game closer to puzzle than straight city builder. In Terra Nil you have to bring a dead polluted back to life by filling in rivers, plants, and wildlife. Reaching each terraforming milestone gives you access to more tools for cleaning the landscape. It has different difficulties, that determine how carefully you need to think about building placement. I prefer to play on the mode where you don’t have to worry about resources at all and simply solve the problem of bringing back nature as a benevolent deity.
Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles
The developer on this game would literally publicly shame me for calling this game chill, and therefore I won’t. Bulwark takes place in a unique fantasy universe in which your goal is to do... something. The game has active simulation elements, factions, trade routes, and combat but you as a player are more... adjacent to all this than forced directly into it. It has the same roots from Townscaper, but leans ever so slightly into resource city building. There are actually only three resources in the game, and you either have them or not based on proximity to the extraction site. The rest of the game is freeform building just like in townscaper, or any of the other games mentioned. The civilizations you can create are beautiful and complex, and they change depending on your faction alignment as well. The best thing is that Bulwark is actually free on steam because the demo IS the full game. Buying it strictly supports the dev.