Building Relationships is a game about roaming an island and meeting potential romantic partners. But that's not all: You're a building. Specifically, you're a house who eats furniture, loves fishing, and even knows how to jump. As a house, you roll around this island at sometimes ridiculous speeds, chatting with different buildings and going on dates with them.
I saw Building Relationships at Gamescom Asia x Thailand Games Show on Saturday. It's a funny game but, crucially, it's not just funny because you're a building. It's also funny in the same way Baby Steps is: there's something inherently comical about the moment-to-moment movement, the bonkers physics, and the sense that you're always in control but only just.
When the seductive protagonist does find a date—perhaps with a charismatic windmill, or a friendly manor, or a "himbo" tent—the process proceeds as a mini-game. For example, as my house dined with a grand old abode, I had to put together a flat-pack table for my romantic interest to eat (because buildings eat furniture, obviously).
Building Relationships is predominantly the work of Thai developer Tanat Boozayaangool, who cites A Short Hike as inspiration. "It's a heartfelt story wrapped around a very silly premise," he told me.
"And also, you can go fishing. But instead of fishing up fish, you fish up cars." (I am assured there are lore reasons for this.)
The idea occurred to Boozayaangool a decade ago, during a game jam themed around 'Construction Destruction'. He was tossing up whether to do a building game, or a relationship-oriented game, but ended up doing both and thus, the Building Relationships concept was born.
All the dates in Building Relationships are their own discrete mini-games, so once you build that table for the dapper mansion, you won't be building anything again. "The next part," Boozayaangool said, "is to enjoy the meal. So there's a moving sequence, where you're moving furniture inside a house. That's an intimate moment between two buildings. It can get wild."
Building Relationships is funny because Boozayaangool knows that a comedic game can't lean too heavily on the writing: it has to look funny, and feel funny. "There are some games that approach humour like it's a writer's problem," he said. "There's a lot that writers can do to make things funny but they can only do so much. But in this game the writing and the game design and gameplay plays together. The IKEA furniture mini-game: quite honestly, it's so much work for just the tiniest little joke. Does it pay off? I don't know but I'm doing it anyway."
The smudgy, cosy surrealism of its art style, and the absurdity of the premise, masks what is unmistakably a work of personal expression for Boozayaangool, who's not shy about using the medium towards those ends.
"I started working on the game in a pretty dark place, and it makes sense to reflect that journey in the work itself," he said.
"I feel like, to want to make indie games, you have to be a little bit sad. And a lot of people want to express sadness. For me it's how I understand my sadness—writing about it—and this is an extension to that. I feel like I see that in a lot of games; maybe it's the Asian diaspora [angle]. Like 1000xResist: you have to be sad to want to make a game like that."
If you're curious to see how this bizarre sentient house adventure evolves into something darker, Building Relationships is on Steam and will release in early 2026.
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