Recent reviews by Rainy

Dungeon gameplay without having to grind levels to begin. The bones are good. Progression is good, I like that your talents and new abilities are not tied to some number to grind, but by the highest difficulty completed.

Short wishlist:
-more cosmetics
-a way to view progression (ie, when would i get that next talent point? What is the next ability and what tier unlocks it?)
-private messaging friends in-game

Playing the game vanilla is painful. You can't manage your settlers with precision and there's a lot left unsaid when it comes to basic mechanics and how they work. While I can appreciate less hand-holding, there are some aspects where a tutorial pop-up would be preferred. Which is funny considering that there was a flame that kept popping up while I was gathering materials to build a campfire that would tell me to build a campfire. My first death didn't have a pop-up tutorial that tells you about how respawning works. (Ghost = eat a villager to respawn. Reborn = stat penalty and lose all items on your body.) The game is extremely grindy since you cannot repair your tools and need to keep going back to your workbench to get a new one. We could not explore any of the map ourselves because we kept having to micromanage our villagers and fend off random bear attacks.

The controls were very unintuitive. I reset my controls to Inventory on Tab, Villager Management on I, Block on RMB, Alt. Attack on MMB. I was frustrated when attempting to pick up multiple items off the ground as it's a separate button from the regular pick-up button. It also would only pick up items in a cone in front of my character instead of in a radius around them, which made picking up items that were glitched into terrain or into ghost objects extremely difficult.

I did enjoy the farming and blacksmithing mini-games and the general ambiance. I just wish I could've explored more of the map.

Short, but sweet.
The story is simple and the gameplay is adorable. I did encounter some bugs, 1 being gamebreaking where i had to exit the game and reload. Luckily, the autosave system saved my progress without bricking my save file.
I completed the game in about 2 and a half hours, but to get 100% of the achievements I would assume it'd be another couple hours without looking up a guide on where/how to get those done.

If you enjoyed Untitled Goose Game and/or Dog's Life, you'll enjoy this game.

If you enjoyed Stacklands and have a thing for witchy aesthetics, you'll enjoy this game.

Too buggy, keeps getting errors where the only way to resolve them is to lose all your progress and go back to main menu.

Extremely replayable. So many different paths and choices to make. The addition of the Honor Mode difficulty was a warm welcome for me as I am a perfectionist that tends to reload saves to force certain outcomes. It allowed me to experience outcomes that I would never have allowed before.

I look forward to whatever this game studio comes up with next.

Gameplay isn't that bad, but I definitely wish that I could actually play the game rather than wait 20 minutes to play (regardless if it's by myself or not... why is there a "matchmake" for solo parties?)

So many bugs. The progression feels bad. The grind is tuned up very high. I just completed a mission on the hard difficulty and received NO rewards for it despite it telling me "missions success, 100 currency earned".
( Aug 12, 2022 @ 11:08pm; 4.2 hrs)
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UPDATED REVIEW:

I recently came back to the game after a while and found that all my progress, my character, and anything I had done in the game is now gone. For good. There was no warning from the developers about this happening. Apparently, to prevent this from happening, I was supposed to log in sometime between their update in December to sometime before March. I was hoping to try out the new updates since I last played. I am severely disappointed that I won't be able to get back any of my progress or time spent in this game.

pros
-lots of animals
-lots of room for creativity
-great terrain tools
-crazy good lighting

cons
-early access bugs
-lacks some clarity
-franchise zoo animal trading feels sluggish and buggy

I've been looking for a restaurant game for a while and when this showed up, I was very pleased.


Criticisms:

The game itself is complex to start with and the first few days can be a little slow. There are a few bugs that are to be expected, since this is an early access game.

All in all, I believe that this game has potential.