Recent reviews by BlueFenixR

I have always loved this franchise ever since the first Harvest Moon on the SNES, so im really pretty excited for this one to come to PC, hopefully you will stay and release many of the previous games (remake or not) on pc too!

Its ok for a casual 4 hours or less.

A fun, addictive and a bit hard "City builder" game. tl;dr: I highly recommend despite the Engrish and difficulties of planning and resources gathering since it keeps the game engaging enough to manage these effectively.

First of all, the dev seems to be Japanese and having a somewhat understandable Engrish translation its a godsend, even though there are still some broken string here and there, but not enough to not understand much of what you need to do or what construction does.

Second the premise of the game its really simple, build houses, grow population, keep your people bellies full and improve their livelihoods by making coats, rugs, alcohols, sweets and of course much needed firewood to stay warm. You have a "Culture Level" that will unlock new buildings and harvestable resources as you increase this level, and objectives a fairly simple, population up to a certain point, x amount of buildings, x amount of port "quest" requests. For every newly constructed building (1 per), for every birth, for every dock (not confuse it with port) request fulfilled, for every achievement and using a special food to ark factory, you will get "ARK" a currency used to unlock new buildings and supposedly to build them (It takes 1 per newly placed building or one square of road, but if you build anything with 0 ARK there is no issues), early on you get enough to get you village going but it will become a huge grind later on (around culture level 4/5 and up) so knowing when to use and when to build its important a long with keeping those generations up.

Third, there is resource gathering in this game, the 2 more important ones are Grass (Farming uses A LOT of this) and Wood (Firewood its the basic power for keeping houses warms and for some factories) since these are the most used for keeping villagers fed and warm. Then other 3 early resources are mushrooms (important for food, fishing and hunting), herbs (for food, farming and cooking) and Stones (Construction, homes and roads use it a lot). There are more resources after this that are unlocked as your city prosper (namely Clay, Iron, Gold, Copper, Crystal and Silver). Farming/Ranching its a must with a LOT of variety and you can later make them into a LOT of different types of foods with factories near your homes. As a caveat, some managing of Rocks, Clay and the 2 types of Mountains its necessary since these resources are "limited" in a sense that its difficult to come across them if you exhaust your entire island of them, there are some structures that will let you make more of these but it requires a rare material (Crystals) and they are dangerous to use (Exploding underground water for clay, falling Meteors for stones to name a few), the other material that needs managing its Trees, you can plant more with a special worker but it consumes a lot of grass, also Grass grows almost anywhere but most notably near trees, herbs and mushrooms only grow near trees.

Fourth, food managing its deceptively simple but hard to properly manage, if you explode your population you will run into a lot of food/firewood related problems so striking a balance between getting more food sources and building new houses its a must, luckily you get a counter for how much food you have in your homes (A good rule of thumb its keeping more than half of it full, lower and there will be problems in the short/long run) and Firewood (If there isn't enough more food its wasted since they are cold, also a counter for it with the same rule as food, more than half). Later on another culture level, once you build a new building you will get the food Storage counter to help with keeping the balance, and the "Enviromental" counter which its something like how happy your villagers are with the extra goods (Alcohol, sweets, clothes, rugs, tools) and nearby buildings (Like parks, wells, fountain and some other unique buildings with extra effects), the more you have, the longer lived your villagers will be.

Fifth, Planning/Zoning its a learned skill and not something you will get on your first island, it will take a decent amount of practice to know what works best and what doesn't (ProTip, Carriers in range of BOTH houses and food storages/factories for best effect. Protip2 place Food Factories in front, storage road storage or tools/clothes/firewood factories behind food factories and Farms behind storages for a well managed supply chain)

Six, there is no combat danger to your villagers but there are a lot of wild animals or "Pests" since they will steal from your farms and storages if you leave them alone, having enough hunters covering a wide range its necessary to control these or you will have a bad time.

Now for the cons:

- Villagers dying its a pain since you will need to assign new ones back to their workplaces, but there is 2 tools to deal with this, early on you can click on the death announcement of a villager to immediatly select+go to the workplace to place a new one and Later on there are buildings and Upgrades that allow auto recluiting when someone days and there is available villagers in the work pool. Another problem its building too far away from your houses will make it harder to recluit new workers to those sites, and being that far away makes it more dangerous since they can't reach their homes fast enough to get warm and eat food.

- Fire, it comes out of nowhere and can cause a lot of problems where almost every villager comes running looking for water to extinguish the fire, the only recommendation its placing wells in a good number of places so they don't have to run that far.

- Construction its a pain since there is only one button to forcibly assign constructors, otherwise i believe it either works by who's nearer or the order in which you set the build order, early on it makes it difficult to place roads because of this (You either place long roads that might only employ one villager, i haven't truly checked this yet, but takes a lot of time to construct and get the materials to the construction or do short roads but it takes a lot of people from the constructors pool)

- Warehouse/Storage range its not clear, so you might have some situations where you lose resources because it was too far and the alternative its building railroads (same situation as roads) to move from warehouse to warehouse (and this comes with their own unique problems, like not properly planning your warehouse space, taking a lot of space from place to place reducing expansion of your homes, etc). There is balloon carriers to manually select which resource to move between warehouses but it requires a lot of fuel and takes a lot if its too far.

Great game, killer soundtrack, good gameplay loop, short sessions for amazing replayability and the possibility of mod tools in the future can make the content near limitless.

10/10 would recommend.

If you wanted a game full of shiny achievements, this is the one, everyone seems to give up before finishing the first area, i wonder why?...

Review Pending.

Reason: I'm way toooooooooo busy maintaining my base and enjoying the game in general to write a proper review.

Deadline: 50 to 60 more hours :D

A few hours in (Counting the ones in the demo) i have the following to say:

- Yes, walking takes energy. No its not that big of an issue, like most games with energy management to take into account, it usually just sucks at the start of the game and becomes a non issue later on.

- I do have to admit that walking its not an issue but running is, the stamina consumption while running its way too high to be honest.

- Fairly early after you finish the tutorial you get the map to help you plan your routes to make the most out of your energy and more importantly it allows you to fast travel to camp whenever you want.

- Running out of stamina its just a slap on the wrist, you get transported next to your bed and recover half of your stamina, you don't lose anything at all.

- Farming its simple enough and crops grows all the time unlike other farming games where you need to wait a whole day for them to grow.

- Cooking its relevant since you need to make the food items to increase how farther you can explore, there are limited slots for cooked food and they don't stack so finding more crops and fishing its important to make those high level dishes for higher stamina regeneration. The max 1 dish can recover its 2 stamina segments (There are 4 in total).

- There is some simple crafting and material gathering by chopping trees and finding stuff in crates. So far i have only made quest related stuffs.

- The introduction its kinda long, but certainly not the worse i have seen, go see the one from the new Doraemon SoS games, easy 1 hour.

- Controls can get a bit awkward but mostly while farming due to every crop being bunched together.

- Waking up from a nap its annoying, sometimes it works and it last enough to recover stamina but most of the time it doesn't and i wake up in the middle of the night.

- Nighttime its nap time, its way too dark to do anything.

Will update when i get more time in but so far its a decent game so far.

A good excuse to play more with Copen, nuff said.

Great game, a good spiritual sequel to many castlevania games from the DS era.

Recommended only if you are a huge masochist.