Bite-sized Review:
Tranquil Isle

By Chris Picone, 18 April, 2025

Tranquil Isle is a curious city builder in that, in some ways, it turns the concept on its head. For example, there is no resource management.  For the most part, that makes Tranquil Isle a chill, casual sort of game, but it doesn't need to be - it's point based, and there's a leaderboard.

Aesthetics

Tranquil Isle is a lovely world full of pastel colours.  There are a few biomes to choose from; the usual, such as grassland, winter, or desert.  These are really just aesthetic choices though, they don't really affect the game in any way, other than sort of changing the colour scheme while you play and including small changes like whether your houses are stone, wooden, and changing little things like the bunting which can be party lights or lanterns. I don't think it's a low poly game but they've kept all the building and environment designs very simple.  It's a nice looking game in all, with some fittingly chill music. 

Gameplay

Tranquil Isle is definitely a minimalistic game.  As the Steam page advertises, there is no combat, no resource management, and no micromanagement of any kind. You start with a very limited number of buildings you can place. Every time you place a building, you score some points, and as you hit each new score threshold, you unlock some more buildings to place. Unlike most citybuilders, you don't unlock the blueprints to the building that would allow you to build as many copies of it as you like, you only unlock a certain allocation of buildings. You get two choices every unlock so you can try to at least pick the buildings that will fit best with what you have already.  Each building also has a different point score, based on its size, possible synergies, and difficulty in placement (some need to be placed near trees or water, for example), so that's something to pay attention to. The game's all about synergy:  To rack up a decent high score, you need to try to place buildings next to other buildings that give boosts and away from others that subtract. For example, houses benefit from being near alters, town centres, and other houses, but their score is reduced if they are placed close to any kind of industry.  There are three game modes. In classic, you have to try to fit as much into the limited space available as you can, as synergistically as you can, until you run out of room or fail to make a point threshold. Then it's game over and your score is racked up. Maps are procedurally generated but there's also a neat daily map where everyone competes for a high score on the same map.  If you don't want to compete, you can play in sandbox mode. 

Verdict

I initially found Tranquil Isles to be very fun. It really shines in classic mode on small maps where space is very tight and you have to be very careful.  Daily mode's also fun for a challenge. On medium and larger maps, I found there actually wasn't that much variety in buildings, and so I was just placing the same things over and over and over again.  So I did enjoy the game and can recommend it, but unless the developer continues to add more buildings (and I really hope they do), there really isn't enough variety for anything beyond small maps, and unfortunately little replayability.

Links: 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2324180/Tranquil_Isle/