Cutout Village enters early access on 21 October

Cutout Village enters Steam early access on Wednesday 21 October, built around an idea that will ring a bell with anyone who grew up with scissors and a glue stick. Spanish studio DevilishGames asks you to rebuild an almost deserted village by cutting, folding and gluing sheets of paper. Every building you unlock in the game also comes as a printable PDF, so you can make it for real on your desk. It’s out on PC and Mac, and version 1.0 is planned for 2027 alongside console releases. Early access should last three to six months while the studio finishes the game with its players.

At a glance

Cutout Village and its paper hometown

In its Steam announcement from 21 September, DevilishGames describes the game as a blend of village building and paper crafting. Your characters inherit an old family home in the village where they spent their childhood. Years later, the place has been left almost completely empty. It’s up to you to rebuild its streets and trade with the people who live there, uncovering the village’s story along the way.

In Cutout Village, building quite literally means cutting, folding and gluing. As you progress, you unlock more than 50 buildings, services and decorations to grow and customise the village. The studio cites traditional crafts and the paper cut-out books that were popular through the 20th century as its inspiration. The art direction mixes watercolours, paper models and handmade books, for a calm pace with no pressure. According to the Steam page, the game is available in eight languages, including English, Spanish, Catalan, French and German.

Yvonne van Geloven of LadiesGamers sums up the story in her piece on the early access date: two siblings return to their grandmother’s town to find the buildings crumpled up and the streets deserted. Her colleague Mina had already shared positive impressions after playing the demo.

Paper models you can print at home

This is the most original idea in Cutout Village. Every building you unlock also exists as a printable PDF sheet, which you can cut out, fold and put together by hand in the real world. The game follows you all the way to your kitchen table, scissors and glue in hand.

DevilishGames takes the Cutout Village idea even further. Since March, a series of four cut-out books based on the game has been on sale on Amazon, with more than 50 models to build, from houses and characters to a huge castle. The studio behind Minabo, Path to Mnemosyne and Bambas! also described itself as having an experimental approach to video games when it first announced Cutout Village on Steam in September 2025.

Early access, version 1.0 and consoles

The studio explains its early access decision in the announcement: “we believe the best way to finish the game is by listening to the people who play it.” According to DevilishGames, the core experience is already complete, and the remaining work covers polishing mechanics, improving balance and adding features, including a Free Mode that is still in development. Version 1.0 is planned for 2027, alongside Nintendo Switch, Xbox and PlayStation versions.

The game has already come a long way. Its demo launched on 21 May during the Six One Indie Showcase and stayed playable until the end of June’s Steam Next Fest, according to a studio post on Steam. Around the same time, Deepak Chongtham at COGconnected reported that the full version would include a story mode of around eight hours and a free build mode. Consoles were then pencilled in for the second half of 2026, before the studio moved them to 2027 with the final release. On Steam, Cutout Village ranked 3,514th among the most wishlisted unreleased games on 13 October, according to Valve’s chart.

If relaxed management games are your thing, our Nivalis Nights review covers another way of growing a place at your own pace, built around a noodle stand.