One of the things that can be a lot of fun as a “vintage gamer” is digging into modern titles that provide a taste of great experiences from your earlier years. Sure, there are loads of retro-styled remakes, remasters, and the like, but for the most part I’m just happy when modern titles can capture some of the essence of what made terrific games special while doing their own thing. One PC title from way back in the day that I truly adored was Bullfrog’s Theme Park, which really laid the groundwork for many more modern amusement park sims with its outstanding mix of fun design, smart management elements, and simply being a fun fishbowl simulator of sorts as you’d watch people enjoying your park.

Boardwalk Builders is obviously shooting for that same sort of look and feel to an extent, though at a much smaller scale and with more humble objectives. You’ll be taking charge of the local seaside boardwalk, trying to set up shops, places to eat, and even some basic attractions to get people to come down to the shore. While your core set of businesses to choose from is relatively limited, as you progress you’ll have the option to combine businesses in order to create new ones. Steadily discovering the new businesses you’ll be able to create by doing this at least helps keep up some interest in wondering what’s next.

The problem I ran into after a short while though is that underneath the hood it was really hard to grasp onto what was really going on, working, and not working. Where most sims like this have you taking baby steps and progressing slowly, making it easier to determine what to do and how, the more rapid growth you tend to have here made it tougher to get a bead on. You’re certainly able to push too far and put yourself into the red, and that’s where the lack of clarity in how things work starts to be an issue. The fact that it feels like maintenance workers are used as one-offs and not ongoing employees also threw me. Worst of all though, after experimenting for a while and feeling like I wanted to get off the ride and start over again to do a better job of it, for the life of me I could find no such option. I suppose I could outright delete my save file, but that feels extreme and shouldn’t be necessary. I like the spirit of the game, but spending time with it I walked away more disappointed than anything, feeling like it has a decent foundation but hits its limits a bit too quickly.