Recent reviews by marbmallow

It's cute and looks great - character designs are hilarious and lovable.
The animations, the music, and the ability to place rooms and customize their shape and layouts were also things I really appreciated and enjoyed..

However the amount you have to travel back and forth, even with fast travel is a bit much. The never-ending grind to improve your B&B rating never really rewards you with any satisfaction because you have to cram your rooms with furniture so they all end up looking the same. Getting high enough rankings just unlocks another property to grind for. I just unlocked cooking and thought things would get a bit more fun and rewarding, but it's just another thing to juggle and resource gather/fetch quest for, all to get your B&B ratings up in your cramped little houses.

I love chill management games and overall I started off charmed albeit mildly bored. I hoped it would get more interesting/fun but just short of 8 hours in and sadly nothing has really changed my opinion. The progression just feels way too slow and you get no joy from decorating once you realise how much furniture you have to cram into a room to get a decent rating, the UX and UI is kinda clunky and I'm constantly fighting it and randomly getting stuck in decoration menus.

Overall I don't know if I could recommend it? It's not a bad game by any means but it's not super fun either.

It's a Simp Simulator....a simpulator?
Beth is really unlikeable for a character which makes the very little gameplay you experience incredibly grating.

Voice acting is of a high standard, as are the graphics...Just a shame the gameplay is sooo slow. You could close your eyes and hold down W to play.

This game feels too maybe too ambitious for the time and budget put into it. Everything about it feels very unpolished. I got stuck on some stairs for 5 minutes because I got wedged between 2 NPCs LOL...

The map designs are bizarre, for an "open world" style map you really only have 1 path to explore. There's a lot of random dead ends everywhere, and it doesn't really hint where you should go to progress quests. The map was bugged and didn't show one of the quest locations either so I had to wander around and guess where to go.

The UI is awful and distracting. Even the D-pad quick menu doesn't work like how you would expect it to work.

The music sounded nice but It was a bit manic for the pace of the game. The sound had some really weird bugs, every animal makes CONSTANT animal sfx that are louder than the music. There's literally no pause in their bleating, clucking or mooing, it's literally a stream of unending animal sounds, which is overkill when you start out on a farm at the beginning!

Character models are wonky looking, and the animation is pretty poor. However environments are fairly nice, the lighting is generally set up beautifully in the level designs, light filters through the foliage and the game can look quite pretty at times.

They need to scrap the stamina system, it doesn't affect fighting and only hinders movement. Also Baldo sounds like he's drowning when he runs low on stamina (every 10 seconds of sprinting) which is pretty unpleasant...

Overall, I would wait for refinement and quality of life fixes.

This is a review for the Brutal edition. Played around 9 hours, alone, in a party of 2 and in a party of 3.

Pros:
- Great art direction, looks fantastic, monsters are cool, level biomes are awesome, characters are neat.
- Great music in the few areas where you can hear it.
- Fun random spell/scroll system makes fights unpredictible.
- Challenging fight mechanics and friendly fire in co-op keeps you on your toes.
- Really fun co-op play.
- Lots of collectibles
- Every playthrough is totally different to the last. The randomly generated levels did not dissapoint.

Cons:
- Not worth £22.99, even after the Brutal edition update, this game is only worth it in the sale.
- Poorly optimized, encountered lag and framerate drop issues, which was surprising for a low poly game, since the levels aren't even that big.
- Non scaling difficulty! Playing alone was near impossible, whereas playing in a party of 3 was too easy. Playing with 1 other friend in a party of 2 was the sweet spot.
- Still pretty buggy. Clipping issues, in one playthrough a friend got stuck underneath two moving platforms. Also a reoccuring issue; when a friend dies while fighting, if you revive them, they still finish their attack mid-swing right after they ressurect back. (Since friendly fire is on, this usually means they stab their rescuer.)
- Issue with the probability of equippable armour appearing in chests? We were a party of 3, (2 rogues, 1 brute) however throughout our 6 hour playthrough we were only finding rogue armour. By the end of the game we were swimming around in tier 4 rogue armours but our brute was still wearing his tier 1 gear. At first we assumed there just hadn't been any armour made for him, but after viewing the trailer again it seems there just wasn't any spawning for him in our games...

OVERALL, I'm glad I played it, and thankful the dev team took previous feedback into account. It's a fun little game albeit needing some bug fixes and polish still. If it's on sale and 40%+ off, it's definitely worth getting into with a friend. Otherwise, hold off until then.