If you’ve enjoyed building toy Townscaper, or perhaps landscape puzzler Dorfromantik, Cloud Gardens seems to fall somewhere evenly between the two. Developers Noio of Kingdom: New Lands fame, call it “partly a gardening simulator, partly a dystopian landscape builder, and partly a puzzle game.” You can catch a bit of all that in the new launch trailer up above. You can build industrial creations like stacks of shipping crates overrun with ivy or work your way across a series of campaign-like puzzles that have you use rain and tools to cultivate the environment until it’s been sufficiently green-ified. Between that and the extremely calm soundtrack, it seems like a very swell, calm time. I don’t know if everyone’s agreed on a name for these toy-like sandbox building joints just yet, but I’m well up for more of them, especially when they come with a little hint of puzzling. On its official launch day, Noio say that Cloud Gardens will be getting a pretty substantial update bringing a “branching overworld map, weaving together all of the existing areas and adding more than 15 new levels, plus a whole load of extras in the Creative Mode: 120+ new items, custom skyboxes, freecam mode and tonnes of quality-of-life improvements.” If you’re growing an interest in these puzzle-y builders too, you can find Cloud Gardens over on Steam and Itch for £11.39/$14.99. It will also be launching on the Xbox boxes on September 1.
