OUTSIDE THE BLOCKS
- Hubert Spala
- 1 minute ago
- 5 min read
Not so long ago, I was pondering the need for the industry to push into reality the creation of new genres. As I mentioned in my rant, I don't believe Roguelike is a genre per se anymore. But other than that, we have such a broad spectrum of games now that I feel a need to expand our labels. Like those games about driving a car but not being about racing - and yet being IN the car is still the only activity. Vroomers? Chillriders? You decide. Or that emergent term - metroidbrainia - where combat might not even exist and the trapping of the exploration and incremental unlocks is framed by puzzles.
The world of Cozy Games also feels this lack of additional tags. What's a cozy game, anyway? A bit of soothing entertainment with no stress and low to zero stakes? Well, okay, but that can be anything, right? Walking sim, fishing game, collectathon, you name it. What I recently found out to enjoy most in that space - possibly due to my real-time hobby of painting miniatures - are Diorama Boxes. Less of a game, more of an ah, artistic app with framed limitations? A toybox, but in a way very open-ended. It's not meant to be a playground of little knick-knacks to toss around and interact with, but a workshop desk. A place where you can assemble your beautiful, tiny scene until your sense of completion allows your mind to settle on done.
We have more and more games like this in recent memory. TINY GLADE, for a while, took the scene by storm. I am sure plenty of people still very much enjoy its organic sculpting. MAKE ROOM hit us too, with a tiny, intimate assembly of little chambers. HOZY is on the horizon, mixing clean-up with décor in stunning fidelity.
And now OUTSIDE THE BLOCKS joins that growing family, offering a superlative toolkit to indulge in your model-making desires. It's an interesting project, due to its well-focused idea. It is not meant to be a very open-ended set of tools in which you can go wild and make anything your heart desires. In my experience, any such projects often stumble at the sheer complexity of possible outcomes. In the amount of bits the player is offered. No, here we are politely offered a task of creating dioramas in a glass box or bauble. With a limited set of visuals to play with, too, neatly covered as an asset package - for a start, a Medieval one.
There's a sweet sense of intimacy here that might be hard to put into words. The scenes, even the biggest one, are still small. The smallest one is positively minuscule! And yet the very act of containing them within a glass cover (which is optional!) makes them feel strangely real. Tangible, in a way, tactile in their presentation. Once you craft your tiny model, it is not hard to feel as if you could reach through the screen and yank it out of its digital shackles to place it on a shelf beside you.
All that thanks to astonishing details of the assets we can tinker with. See, I mentioned before that the selection of bits and bobs is pretty small, for the time being. The singualr themating package offers just enough components to give some sense of open-ended possibilities... but you will quickly run out of new elements to play with. Normally that would be quite an issue for a game like this, but there's a catch. An ace up this title's sleeve. Other than the actual items you can place on the scene, you have a staggering amount of control over the pure presentation. Lighting of the chamber, reflection on the glass dome. Materials used, textures for components. Biomes that alter the foliage, fog, rain, snow. Variety of hyper-realistic water types! It's like half of the game is packed in here, in the cinematic control of how to display your little scene - and those controls are mighty indeed. There was a good long hour of pure joy merely browsing through them, before I even tried my hands at crafting my little diorama.
And even once you see it all, a good set of tools lets you get really creative with it. Quickly, you pick up how to make your own fences. How to fill up the holes in the catalogue by sheer ideation. How you can add elements to structure walls, make your own stairs, and tweak existing shapes into your needs. Discovering a fun trick to achieve a particular visual outcome is a big part of enjoyment in such games - at least for me!
Is it a perfect example of this little genre? Not yet. There are some issues I must mention. Raising buildings is a strangely complex endeavour. Tutorial does its best to explain, step by step, how the gizmos behind buildings work, but I find myself constantly stumbling over it all the time. What I can cut, what I can edit. How to work with the rigid size expansion system. How to make the cursed roofing fit! I am not saying the system here doesn't let you be pretty precise, but the precision is not easy to achieve. It takes some learning and some minor cussing under the nose to get the shapes you want, to push things here just right. Another thing I missed dearly - and perhaps it is even in the game, but I never found it - is free rotation of smaller elements. Oh how I yearn to be able to lay a wagon wheel flat upon the ground...
I want to believe. And so, I am rating this title a bit higher than I should. It's a really good bit of fun, a lovely intermission from higher-octane fun. Spend an hour or two per evening, craft a pretty scene, enjoy the fruits of your labour! However, for this to have proper legs and a bit more staying power, what is needed - and fast! - is expanding on the available items. The medieval pack is a nice way to frame it from the dev, because it already suggests that other packs might be available in the future. I hope it's going to be sooner rather than later! But for now, OUTSIDE THE BLOCKS is a superb little diorama box and one that will fill your time with pleasant feels thrumming through your noggin.
