There is something very aesthetically pleasing about the zones and the construction squares in Cities Skylines 2. It’s like clicking in jigsaw pieces. After you build your road, you carefully line up industrial, commercial, and residential zones so they’ll look neat and almost symmetrical. But what if you want to ‘paint’ your cityscape with a free hand? Developed by a small team and playable soon on Steam, a new city-building game lets you imagine and construct enormous metropolises, but without the restriction of tiles or grids. A cozier, calmer take on Manor Lords, PCGamesN has just gotten an exclusive look at City Tales: Medieval Era.
Created by Irregular Shapes, City Tales casts you as the chief builder and pseudo castellan of a budding Middle-Ages settlement. Wood must be chopped. Stone must be mined. The people need homes, marketplaces, and workshops. But compared to some of its city-building game peers, City Tales puts a few key twists on the traditional systems.
Firstly, you’re not working alone – as opposed to the faceless, omnipresent god hand that you normally play in city builders, in City Tales, you have a team of close companions who you need to work with and level up as your settlement expands. One of your pals might be a specialist in woodcutting. When you build a new logging camp, before it can start producing, you need to assign him to the building to serve as its manager. For each new building that he oversees, he gains experience, giving him the ability to unlock and maximize productivity in more advanced, late-game constructions.
For more complex buildings, you may need to assign multiple companions. They will also come to you with personal missions and requests, and if you want to boost your relationship with them you need to make sure that their needs are met, as well as those of your wider citizenry. That part of City Tales feels a little Stardew Valley. It’s not all about dispassionate construction – you’re also forging personal relationships.
Fundamentally, though, it’s all about the building, and Irregular Shapes has created a unique toolset so you can make your towns and cities look however you like. You don’t choose zones or prefab buildings and drop them onto tiles. In City Tales, you use your cursor to free draw the outlines of new districts, making them as big, small, symmetrical, or disjointed as you like. Once the outline is finished, you can place buildings inside it, and their 3D models will change to accommodate the shape. If you plonk a big manor house in a tight corner of your district, your citizens will build it to that specification, so instead of rows of uniform homes, each one is distinctive.
City Tales also has a smart, streamlined way for you to share resources between towns. Once a district is producing goods, you can highlight it and set a circular area of ‘influence.’ Any other settlement that is caught inside that ring will get the benefit of the goods produced in the initial district. Build a well in one town, for example, and then set an area of influence that includes three others. Now, all four of them can use the well.
Instead of micromanaging taxes, fuel, and working hours, the focus in City Tales is on creating sprawling builds. It’s a medieval game crossed with a cozy game – while your citizens share resources and lay the roads, you can focus on creating the perfect mining town, or drawing a handsome ring of houses around the new castle. Due for release in 2025, City Tales will be playable thanks to an expansive new demo arriving on Friday February 14, during Steam Next Fest. If you want to wishlist it, just head here.
Alternatively, try some of the other best medieval games, or maybe the best strategy games available on PC today.
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