ShantyTown is a new diorama city-building game coming to Steam

ShantyTown is a brand-new diorama city builder that is coming to Steam later this year.

Developed by new studio Silk Softworks, founded by Kainga: Seeds of Civilization developer Erik Rempen, the game tasks you with creating lively, hand-crafted urban dioramas in unique locations.

Each location in the game has a story to tell, and you bring it to life with your creations, whether that’s vertical farms, stilted casinos, floating tea shops, mountaintop temple bathhouses, or something completely different.

An official screenshot of ShantyTown, showing one of the things you can build in the game.

As each location offers a curated set of objects that appear three at a time and limited space to work with, you’ll need to unleash your creativity by stacking and arranging items to create dense and eye-catching dioramas before taking a scenic shot and moving onto the next build.

There’s also a dossier so you can look back at your builds, as well as a dynamically adaptive soundtrack by vaporwave artist Macroblank to keep you busy.

ShantyTown will launch in Q4 2025 on Steam, but Silk Softworks will be running a public Steam Playtest that you can register for on Steam.