Fangtopia might be filled with werewolves, ghost trains and every other scary thing you can think of, but it’s actually a thoroughly cosy kind of game. In fact, Absolutely Games and Secret Mode describe it as being “care-free, scare-free”, and as you start to plop down tiles and connect up your lands of this puzzle kingdom builder, and I agree. It’s about as scary as a pumpkin spice latte or a Halloween themed gingerbread biscuit. It’s about are moreish too.
There’s a few different game modes and twists to Fangtopia – two of which are available in the demo that’s now live on Steam – but the core of the game remains the same. You’ve got a slew of hexagonal land tiles and you place them down, trying to match and pair terrain and environments of the same type, and rotating multi-biome tiles to give the best matches to the correct sides, earning points as you go.
It’s so simplistic and yet so satisfying to build this out. The gentle puzzling comes in as you get split tiles and try to join up the terrain into contiguous blocks, while a slightly more taxing variant of this coming in the form of railway tracks, which run through a particular environment. Connect these up and a ghost train will haunt the tracks, going back and forth to its own spooky timetable, but you have the consideration of the terrain that it’s going through to earn points. You don’t need to have a defined terminal and stations, at least, but it’s a nice thematic wrinkle, and there are further rewards for certain landmarks if you’re able to chain track together to their requirements.
You’ll pick up landmarks as you score points in the main game mode, those points coming from how successfully you’re grouping tiles together, and are then given a choice of things like a Frightful Fountain and Possessed Plough. These then have heftier demands, rewarding you mightily for connecting to two town and one mountain, for example. That, of course, requires you to leave spaces free or leave channels as you’re building outwards.
Glowing mission tiles will periodically appear as well, portal objectives for you to build towards, and then requiring you to surround or connect them to a certain number of a certain tile. These then reward you with monsters, like a Wily Werewolf or a Scarecrow to be out standing in his field. Compared to the landmarks, these are a much bigger deal, as they come with additional tiles arranged in a set formation, asking you to rotate and place in a way to get the most out of them.
The only stress really comes when you start to run out of tiles in your stack, and have a points total to try and hit to earn a landmark for more tiles, a portal that you’re trying to reach and satisfy, or just a high score that you’re chasing.
But that’s just the main Fangtopia game mode, and there’s other puzzle variants that you can tap into instead. Instead of starting from a single title and spreading how you see fit, Island mode presents you a little archipelago to grow and connect up using haunted railway tracks. As you connect the islands together, more of them appear around the edges of the screen. It’s a tougher spin on the puzzling, I feel, spreading your tiles and mish-mash of biomes out more broadly.
The mode I haven’t tried yet is Goulish mode, which promises a bigger world and a wider set of tile types to play with.
Fangtopia is just a nice and cosy game for this increasingly spooky time of year. while the full game is out on 26th October, PC players should certainly hop into the demo that’s available today for a taste of the relaxed puzzling that it offers.
