Le Petit Architecte

Building things takes time and effort, especially if you want to do it right. This is especially true for actual buildings, given the fact that most of them need to be safe enough for people to live or work in them. Hence, an architect’s job is quite stressful, not to mention tough. However, they are also well-paid and have a chance to go down in history for their bold designs.

Le Petit Architecte is a pretty weird game, in the sense that there is probably nothing quite like it out there. It’s a sandbox game in which you have to build a tower as tall as you can, but the materials at your disposal are atypical to say the least. Swimming pools, AC units and giant cats are just some of the building blocks in your arsenal, which means that the end result might not even resemble a tower of any kind.

You do not get to choose which items to use, because they are randomly created by the game whenever you perform a mouse click. All you can decide is the direction in which to throw the said object, but you have no control over its size or shape. Whether your design could use a street lamp or a cat to achieve stability, you have to go on faith that everything is going to be alright.

As it generally happens with experimental games, they don’t work as intended sometimes. In this case, you might stumble in a wide variety of bugs and glitches along the way, such as objects disappearing and  faulty collisions. On the other hand, it is pretty difficult to optimize a system such as this one, especially when nothing makes sense and randomness is the main ingredient.

In the graphics department, you need to lower your expectations quite a bit, although the game doesn’t necessarily look too awful. Some of the objects are too low-poly to be pleasing to the eye, but there’s an upside to this fact as well: The game runs smoothly even after you have a giant pile of random items on top of each other. Thus, at least you don’t have to worry about substantial frame drops, at least not until much later.

While Le Petit Architecte is not the kind of game to go back to on a regular basis, it can be a nice distraction when you have nothing better to do. The challenge of building the tallest tower should make the experience quite enjoyable.