The best sandbox games such as Stardew Valley, Terraria, and Minecraft are among the most relaxing games about. But if you’ve ever had a situation where something just wouldn’t quite place down where you wanted it, or you’ve spent an hour carefully putting together a new base layout piece by piece only to realize the whole thing is one block too large and everything is fundamentally out of alignment, you’d be forgiven for wanting to just throw the whole thing at the wall. In new city builder Overthrown, however, you can do exactly that.
Overthrown is a new building game with a chaotic twist – or to use the parlance of indie developer Brimstone Games, a “bingo bongo city builder inspired by games like Kingdom and Don’t Starve.” While most of what you see, from the block-based world design to the rows of giant cartoon fruit, are much as you expect, the hook is that everything in the world, from trees to resources, NPCs, and even the buildings themselves, can be picked up by your character and hurled bodily across the map thanks to the strength-boosting properties of a magical crown.
Conveniently, that means you can grab trees and just hurl them at your sawmill, which will suck them in and start processing them immediately. As someone who loves sandbox gathering and crafting games but doesn’t have the patience to sit around sorting out individual items into organized boxes, that’s a huge boon. You’ll also be able to hire NPCs to help you out with the work, although without spare crowns to go around they’ll have to do the hard work themselves.
That’s just the start, however. “Many people have been asking, ‘You can throw the trees at the sawmill, but can you throw the sawmill at the trees?’ Well, this is a bingo bongo city builder, so yes, absolutely – but you can also do this,” the dev responds, picking up the sawmill itself and carrying it over their head through the forest to instantly saw down trees in their wake. “Was this necessary? No. Is it fun? Yes.” I’m definitely on board.
“You can only spend so many hours moving buildings in Animal Crossing, or destroying things in Don’t Starve Together, before you decide to make a game where you can move anything whenever you want,” Brimstone explains of its decision to create Overthrown. “When you spend over 800 hours time traveling in Animal Crossing because one of your buildings just doesn’t align with the others, you just want to throw things instead.” I can certainly sympathize with that.
Overthrown is planned to support up to six players. It currently doesn’t have a release date and the developer, which previously made joyful rocket-jousting multiplayer game Lance A Lot, says it’s “still working on a Steam page.” In the meantime, however, you can follow the game’s development with progression updates and live streams available through its official Discord.
While we await more news on Overthrown, there are plenty more of the best sandbox games to help you exercise your creativity, along with the best city-building games – although we can’t promise that they’ll feel quite the same now that your eyes have been opened to the freedom on display here.
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