Unfortunately I found the game boring and repetitive, and it doesn't do many new things in the genre.

7 hours in and I'm still just fishing and catching bugs for the bulk of my time. There's no variety/difficulty in the fishing for the different fish.

I'm sure more things get unlocked as I play, but being on day 17 and still only having 4 NPCs isn't good game design. Yes it's better than Animal Crossing, but with the amount of farming/life games in the market I can go and play something funner with my time.

This game is an interesting, laid back adventure, at first...

But then you take a step back and notice how starter unfriendly it really is.

Things like:
The lack of basic tutorials. I will come back to this later.
Licences that don't do anything on their own, or just don't do anything until later on in the game and should probably be locked/hidden until then. For example the hunting licence, which needs the mining licence, so that you can get the necessary materials to be able to make tools because none of the hunting tools are sold in the early/starter game, or you just don't have the specific crafting device because it's unlocked through the storyline.

Then there's the daily tasks, which can expect you to be able to do things that you aren't quite capable of just yet, or perhaps just roll badly. For example one expected me to chat with multiple characters, yet the game was at a point where there was only 2 characters and one of them didn't have the chat dialogue active because of the specific part of the storyline I was at.

Another issue is how there's an expectation of doing jobs for the characters, but they don't seem to understand how far the storyline has gone, so they have expectations that you just have no ability to fulfil.
This means that you have to go to sleep before the game can reroll the jobs. This is horrible because this stuff is important for gaining new characters to stay in the area.

At the end of the day I feel like your character is just running around doing things so that all the other characters can sit around doing nothing. Yeah thanks old lady for dragging me to a strange island, then basically swindling me of every bit of money, whilst making me jump through your hoops to be able to do anything! 😅

Though seriously the game needs some early balance work, some checks of where the storyline is at, or the in game achievements before making the roll for tasks and jobs would be a great thing to help keep the early game feeling reasonable and more expedited, that way it would feel more immersive to actually making a settlement and not leaving you feeling like other characters are just wasting your time with silly unreasonable expectations.

Some basic tutorials, if not just predetermined daily tasks in the early game, again possibly a check of in game achievements vs basic gameplay elements currently known (ie; if an achievement is known then reroll the task to one that matches the storyline timeframe as well as being unknown to the player), could also be highly appreciated for those of us who are largely PC only, rather than the devs expectation of players having played this kind of game before.
Another way to do this could be a cursor popup tip when you hover over the task, which could also be used to give player an indication of what price things are because currently there isn't any known price when selling things.

It is not what I expected. The game has a lot of merits, it is an interesting idea to transfer (mostly) the Animal Crossing series to the PC. The game is playable and fun, but despite spending 2 years in early access, I feel it still lacks a lot of important mechanics, elements and generally an idea of itself.
Some of the main drawbacks for me are that:
- it is not satisfying and engaging
- The days are too long
- the focus on grind is high, it gets very monotonous
- Not very extensive settings/options
- a little unclear what the point is, what the goal is, what I as a player want to achieve (related to point 1)
- no numerical representation of e.g. energy points (in general, fatigue decreases quickly compared to the length of the day)
- Very bright colors that fatigue the eye until the screen turns gray after losing energy (usually like getting some kind of flashbang).

The list of disadvantages could go on for a long time. On the other hand, it seems to me that many of these features could easily be introduced or should be given to the players to customize by expanding the options. The game certainly has potential, and the number of positive reviews definitely shows that people like Dinkum. I see potential for it to be a 7/10 game, currently it is a 5/10 that needs further work - in its current state I would not recommend this game, although it is worth keeping an eye on.