The most pleasant game of 2021 is now playable in your browser

Townscaper, the game where you poke little buildings into existence, is now available to play for free in your browser. The browser version scales the available space down to a more manageable level than its Steam counterpart, but contains the same procedurally generated towns.

Developer Oskar Stålberg used the Unity engine's ability to port the game onto other platforms. Like the normal version, you drop buildings into the ocean with a click of the mouse. They stack and join together on a grid to create a colorful town. To get different buildings, you can rearrange how you have things laid out by undoing building blocks with a right mouse click. The whole experience is like being a child and playing with toys in a bathtub. That's why our very own Nat called it "an absolutely joyous little time waster" in her Townscaper review.

Once you've built out something cozy, you can take your town via the string of characters after the # in the URL and port it into the Steam version of the game. That version is a fairly cheap $5.99 game and will let you stretch your town out across the screen. Thankfully, the game also features the ability to zoom in and out of your creation as it grows in size.

Townscaper's reach past its PC version isn't quite as impressive as Doom appearing on a calculator, but it has made it to plastic via some users' 3D printed versions of their towns. There's also a first-person browser program that lets you import the .obj file from the game into it so you can walk around your own borough.

If you need a distraction or want to share the delightful boops and blops of this cute game with others, the browser is the easiest place to do it.