Buildings Have Feelings Too!

My instinct when I loaded this up was to treat it like a lightweight city-builder, the kind where you zone land, manage budgets, and watch a skyline grow. That instinct will get you demolished inside the first hour. Buildings Have Feelings Too! is, at its core, a spatial puzzle game wearing a management sim's coat, and the sooner you reset your expectations the better your chances of actually enjoying it. The mechanical hook is genuinely novel. You control a sentient building, wandering a 2D street left and right, directing neighbours to rearrange themselves and assigning businesses to their interiors. Every structure has adjacency relationships: a pub needs residential buildings nearby to draw customers, a distillery needs the pub to consume its whiskey output, a factory pumps pollution that residential blocks despise and must be kept at a distance. Bricks are the currency, earned by hitting upgrade milestones, and they gate your ability to place new structures. The moment-to-moment loop, then, is less about grand planning and more like solving a constrained seating chart one move at a time, working backward from an objective like "get the pub to level three" and figuring out which chain of placements unlocks that result. When a placement clicks and a chain reaction of upgrades fires off, the satisfaction is real. The problems are equally real. The tutorial drops critical information after you actually needed it, and the controls on PC are widely reported as clunky regardless of input method. Mouse-and-keyboard feels imprecise for picking up and repositioning structures along a narrow 2D plane. There is no undo button and no granular quicksave, meaning a misplaced building can start a demolition timer that unravels twenty minutes of careful work. Mistakes are not just costly, they are sometimes irreversible without restarting a chapter entirely. The difficulty curve also steepens sharply after the early neighborhoods, which compounds the frustration of an interface that never clearly communicates all the rules. Infrastructure Permit slots, which can add bonus effects to building types, are largely unexplained and end up feeling like wasted strategic depth. From a pure sim-depth standpoint, the decision tree is thinner than it looks. Each neighborhood stage is essentially a fixed puzzle with a narrow set of valid solutions rather than a sandbox where creative zoning pays off. There is no two-way relationship between buildings and the population they serve, which flattens what could have been interesting demand-side strategy. The resource economy also loses tension once you understand how to chain upgrades, as bricks become abundant quickly. For someone like me who wants mechanical layers to keep revealing themselves at hour 10, the game runs dry earlier than hoped. The absence of a sandbox or challenge mode is a missed opportunity that several critics called out at launch, and nothing in the post-launch update record appears to have addressed it. Where the game genuinely earns praise is its presentation. The Victorian-era visual style is distinctive, the writing between the anthropomorphic buildings is witty and period-accurate, and the neighbourhood soundscapes are pleasant. For a specific type of player, one who likes logic puzzles, has patience for opaque systems, and can stomach an unforgiving save structure, there is a compact, quirky experience buried under the rough edges. Approach it as a puzzle game with a city-builder aesthetic and you will find more to like. Approach it as a management sim expecting macro-level strategic freedom and you will bounce off it hard. With a Metacritic of 53 and a weak critical consensus across 22 reviewers, this is a niche pick that needs to land in exactly the right hands.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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