Based on first impressions so far playing this on the Steam Deck, I'm enjoying it so far, character creation was a good job, soundtrack is easy listening, and Porble designs are cool. My only issue, whilst it might be deck specific, is I've noticed a bit of slowdown when dialogue happens or when I land the last hit in a battle. Hopefully that can be sorted in a future update, but aside from that I'm enjoying things so far!

I rewrote this review several times because it came off as more mean spirited than I wanted it to be. While I am frustrated, I don't want to be malicious to the devs. I am still playing this game and hope the devs keep on making more content.

As of now (5/19/2025) I would hold off on buying this game. On the surface, it looks like everything is great. I like the porble animations, and it has nice music. It reminds me of Coromon, a game I have and enjoy, so I thought this would be something I would like to play. However, this is where I have a problem, and I'm saying this in the nicest way possible: This game is like Coromon just more inconvenient .

Let's say you want to dye your porble, a fun feature that should be something that gives this game an advantage over many monster collection games. (I haven't gotten too far, so I'm not sure if you can buy dyes or recipes from anyone, so take what I say with a grain of salt). You need to first find the recipe for the dye and then get the ingredients. Yellow, for example, needs a jar, 10 yellow droplets, 5 brimstone claws, and an empty dye jar. Brimstone claws are a fairly common drop. However, you need to find an empty jar (may be sold somewhere else, not sure) and dispel porbles that drop yellow ink. In theory, I should be able to use 10 kaibyawns (drops yellow) and go about my day right? Well the thing is, when dispelling porbles (a way to get resources), there's a small percentage chance that it will produce that color. For this porble, the chance for yellow is 3% . On top of this, this game autosaves . This means you can't even reload the game to give yourself another chance of getting the yellow dye. You can pretty much have the worst luck possible and spend countless time farming porbles and dispelling them and still not get what you need. I honestly don't understand this. Yes, I read that higher level porbles are more likely to drop the dye colors (haven't gotten that far), but I don't understand the reason behind this feature. Why make it so hard to get something that doesn't add any stat boost and is purely aesthetic? Why make an early level tutorial about dyeing be unfinishable, since I can't even get enough resources to make 1 dye? Why not give the player a couple dyes for the tutorial (to finish the quest) and sell expensive dyes at the alchemist? This way people can still collect resources, if they want, or farm for gold/orbs for the dyes. This could really be a fun thing to have, but it's pretty much unusable early on.

Alright, let's say, for most players, they don't care about dyes and just want to enjoy the combat. Since the last update/hotfix, not all buffs/debuffs are displaying properly. It might show a red or green square with "..." as the description. I'm not even sure what is getting applied or if it's doing anything. Also, maybe it's just me, I can't tell if the personality description is accurate. I have a porble that should favor towards vigor and dex, but it shows a boost in spirit and constitution. As a result of this, I don't even bother with personalities and just focus on getting porbles that already have good fighting moves.

Another thing I don't get is if you want to catch a porble, you can only use a limited number of items on your tool belt, which only stacks up to 5 (6 for tinkerer, but this trait didn't work for me). What is the point of this; why is it such a low value? Is this something that can be upgraded later? Why can't the belt be a quick access bar, and for something specific I can click on my inventory? I don't understand the reasoning behind this.

Speaking of porbles, there are 6 types, I believe, but you only get to have 3 with you. 3 that can only be changed in town. Why? I have no idea. What I hope is that at some point collecting sigils gives the ability to carry more porbles with you. I don't see anything about this, so this probably won't happen.

Autosaving. Now autosaving is a personal pet peeve of my, but only having the option to autosave really makes crafting early on pointless. I end up wasting so many scrolls and missing out on alternative dialogues. Why can't the restoration fountains be used as savepoints and a shortcut to previously visited towns/savepoints?

This game isn't terrible. You can clearly see time and effort was put into making this game. I just hope things get ironed out.

Its an enjoyable game if you're into the monster capture/battle genre.

Issues to note:
-No cloud save or ways to transfer your save, only local.
-Combat randomly lags to 1-13 fps often, world exploration doesn't lag thankfully.
-traps/pitfalls do absurd damage with zero immunity frames making difficult to traverse/parkour areas slaughter your party