Recent reviews by Syndaryl

* Environmental hazards, including the traditional suffocation, starvation, and death by thirst
* No combat or hostiles
* Elegant and organic unlocking of new areas, and also shortcuts between areas
* All areas modify and evolve as you progress
* You get to see specific effects of your terraforming efforts - the plants, trees, insects, and animals you work with are most common in the environment.
* lightweight and non-essential storyline, but still available as motivation for goal-directed gameplay

This game may be incoherent, but it's also packed with tons of fun things to do. The Custom game difficulty lets you adjust which systems you want in your game (base raids, hunger, etc) along with the traditional tweaks to damage. Plus, you can adjust your Custom game mode even while playing, so if you decide you're interested in fighting off base raids, you can turn them back on. Or if you're like me and you've got a little out of control cooking fridges full of food, turn the hunger requirements up to have a reason to eat all that stuff.

For an Early Access game, it's quite stable. The map is HUGE, there's already a lot of different kinds of Pals, and there's a good number of bosses and dungeons already in place.

There's no real narrative - you can find chapters of NPCs stories and histories, but your own character has no narrative except what you make for yourself. Pal Box (your base) upgrading gives a semi-structured way to play the game if you need some goals, but it rapidly becomes more and more abstract as you go through the steps (basically, "hey, keep levelling up and building new buildings"). If you need more structure or context, this is not yet the game for you.

It already has the bones of how to add a narrative in the future. The quest system used for the Pal Box can be expanded on, there are NPC humans to talk to, there's places to grow if they choose to do this. I don't see the game growing in this direction however - I would expect instead to see more Pals (including unique bosses), more dungeons, more equipment, and more building options (decorative and functional). That seems consistent with the existing content and gameplay style.

Playing in Early Access
- Fun gameplay loop
- "Coziness" setting for difficulty
- Storyline already developing, for part of this first chapter the storyline feels more like a tutorial conceit, but as you go you it becomes more obvious that there is more going on than "Amnesia is an excuse to explain the game to you".
- game is already good quality, lots of attention to stability and squashing bugs, even at this stage.

I love any game with collecting ingredients, but the alchemy map system is stellar. The visual/spatial element is really interesting, and is a great metaphor for research and discovery.

What can I say? This game is evergreen.

As I write this, S:BZ is going through Early Access, and thus lots of rapid changes. That said, it is definitely headed in the direction of being an excellent sequel to the original Subnautica. It might have originally been planned to be a smaller, DLC type addition, but it's definitely bloomed into a large, fully featured game equal in substance to the original.
But right now the storyline is being completely refactored, so I can't comment too much on that. It looks to be going in a good and interesting direction, but it is still early days.

Raft has developed fantastically from the early prototype. You can still focus entirely on the survival/resource gathering and construction element if you prefer, and that part of the game has become much richer and full of variety (I'm particularly excited about the evolution of the cooking system - no more raw eggs!)
The addition of the plotline, however, provides valuable context and pushes the exploration element into something with more meaning and richness.

This peaceful, exploration- and building-focused game has a beautiful visual style, solid mechanics, and strongly open-world style. Astroneer enjoys constant active development, with more features and content, and the procedural world generation gives great replay value. The world-deformation aspect gives a lot of room for creativity in building or art projects.

There are no RPG aspects - there are no skills, levels, talents, or specs; you unlock recipes to create new items, but those recipes are unlocked across the entire server, not for individual players. Gameplay is mandatory third-person (I could do with a first person view).

This is not a strongly narrative game - there is no dialogue or NPCs, no documents to read, no quests, and no direct goals. There are, however, "things" going on that are revealed through exploration and world artifacts (no spoilers!) - this aspect of the game is already interesting, and being expanded on in more updates. I already have over 1,200 hours in this game (I was Early Access) and I still play constantly; I look forward to new updates but I don't need them to maintain my interest.

I'm not a multiplayer-kind-of-person but there is a lively multiplayer community; servers are small and locally hosted (I believe the current maximum is 4, this is being upgraded on November 15th, 2019 if you run a dedicated server). There is no combat mechanic in this game, and lacking strict goals multiplayer is generally a co-operative building or exploration style, with swapping mini-game maps being popular.

As an example of the development teams active efforts and connection to the community: one popular multiplayer activity is creating racetracks for the buggy. The developers have added content to support and enrich the races - checkpoint hoops and gates that can be configured to fire fireworks or trigger lighting. All these pieces are modular and flexible - I use them as gates for my bases, triggering a sort of doorbell system.

They also add cosmetic items like new suits, emotes, and suit colour schemes for events, and as rewards for achievements. These give a nice reward without upsetting game balance.

There are no microtransactions in this game; you can "trade" items and equipment in-game but you cannot transfer assets from server to server and there is no player-to-player currency (there is a "currency" for unlocking recipes but it is server wide and cannot be traded/transported).

Creative, surreal, quick play game (~2 hrs). Loads of fun, I recommend picking up the soundtrack as well because the music is just as fantastic.

This is a short game. But it's also a very tightly designed game, with excellent pacing, good narative delivered in an intriguing indirect way, and lots of clever little details. Humorous and the whole cake business is not the be-all and end-all of the humour. Works an original mechanic to its very limit.