look, there is a learning curve. you will be confused for the first few days. just TRUST ME!!! trust me, stick it out, read the in-game guide, go exploring, join the discord and ask questions if you feel lost. this game is worth it. it really is.

if you are looking for a straight stardew clone, this is not it. it's meant to be more involved, a bit of a slower pace. you will not be farming massive amounts of seeds or reaching the ends of the mines by the end of spring unless you really dedicate all your time to those tasks. it's a beautifully done game that has well thought out mechanics, it is not "chinese stardew valley".

I genuinely don't understand most of the negative reviews especially near time of release. I've played my share of harvest moon/story of seasons/stardew adjacent games - and though occasionally lacking a bit of direction via quests, this game is so full of charm visually, with the characters, and all the systems. You can turn off the minigames if you don't like them, and frankly (normally as a mini game disliker) they are simple and easy, and don't over stay their welcome.

You can feel the love and affection poured into this; while some of the systems could use maybe slightly more meat to them, there's so many and none of them feel obnoxious.

If I had any notes, at most, it'd be being able to track townsfolk and an easier to find path to the tutorials. But frankly most things are pretty darn intuitive!

I'm really enjoying the game play loop, and I can't wait to dig more into character storylines and discover more. I'm deeply excited to see what the devs add and where they go from here!

This is a difficult one, I don't regret buying this game however I could not recommend this game to someone else without some mayor caveats.

So here we go, cons:
1) this game has some mayor consistency problems.
For example, villagers walk around a lot, which is good but the game doesn't take into account when you have a quest with them. For some reason more than any other game in this genre I have played I keep crossing villagers on the road only to enter their house and bam there they are again. In one day it happened twice where I litterly just crossed a villager exiting their house, when I was going to them to furder a quest, just to enter the house and there they where again to progress my quest.
Another example are the animals buckets, When it rains your plants get watered, which is nice but for some reason the open-air water buckets from the animals still have to fill with my little bucket. The animals have a shelter, place their water buckets under there if you have to but dont make me stand in the pouring rain with my little water buckets to fill theirs.
Sure each are minor issues but things like this keep happening each in game day multiple times. It makes it hard to stay emerged in the game. And if this is something that will bother you, please stay away from this game.
2) progression: the thing that bothered me the most about this game is it's progression and how inconsistent it is. The game often times doesn't really tell you what it expects you to do. For example there is a main story line it seems. At some point I had absolutely nothing telling me what to do. I had one quest open related to fishing which had clearly nothing to do with it, after finishing all my other quest hoping it would hint at me what to do. Nothing came up, so I went to progress in the mine but kept encountering a boss like creature I couln't beat (mostly due to the back combat controls I will later expand on) I had upgraded my equipment as far as I could with the material I can access at this point and was about to litterly just stop the game because there was no progress, clearly there where multiple things I hadn't accessed yet but had no clue how to get there. Then I got killed by the boss again and lost some things so at that point I just wanted to defeat it to even the score between me and a bunch of infuriating pixels. Crafted way to many healing kits went at it again using way to many of them and finally defeated it and suddenly two quest lines desided that I could continue with them. Neither had ever even mentioned a relation to the mines and monsters there till that point.
The same happens with all kind of tutorial quest at the beginning, totally random things are needed to trigger them. You will buy and then make things because a quest hints heavely that you will need them later only for another quest to just give this object of blue-print after you already had a need for its production in earlier quest.
At the beginning off spring the game let me accept a villagers request to find a certain kind of fruit for her husband with a 5 day timer. I went looking across the entire map for it, couldn't find it for the life of me. Only to learn 10 days later from another villager that that specific fruit only grew in summer! Why did you even offer me that quest to begin with if I could have never completed it!
3) cluncky combat
The controls overall are fine, nothing special but intuitive enough. Same doesn't go for combat. When I was losing continuely to the boss I first thought this was a me problem or that I was underequiped or something. And sure I might not be the most skilled but after some time I started noticing that I could hit the boar from further away than my sword reached meanwhile if I actually came at a distance where my sword would reach the boar during it's animation I would get dammaged from apperently being to close to it.
Till the end I couldn't figure out the reach of the bosses different attacks it seems totally unrelated to the animation and any real life associations.
This make combat in this game just not verry fun nor rewarding. You don't feel like you get better at it, more like you finally figured out to ignore the animations and got a bit lucky with this encounter. The next boss you can start again with figuring out what it's actual range is etc. trying to ignore the animations, common sense and fighting the controls.
4) map
Why do I need to toggle all the tags on each time I go to the map to look for something. If I wanted to see the villager locations (in game) yesterday, then why would I not want to see the same thing today. It's not even consistent in always showing it or not. If you want to see openings hours, be ready to not have acces to half the map.

That where only some of the mayor things that really broke my joy when playing this game. However like I said I don't entirely regret buying this game, here are the reasons why:
1) price / content ratio: I paid 11 euro's for this game. I have played now for only 11 hours and have barely scratched the surface of it's content. Sure part of that was me running around not knowing what to do due to the earlier mentioned problems with its tutorial and pacing. But still there is a ton of content here for 11 euro's.
2) charming atmosfeer: so far the game has a really charming storie and cast of characters. Nothing ground breaking, it fits verry much in the: you get a farm, grow crops, get animals, help villagers, build relationships, forage, mine and fight a bit - trope. But it has a nice slightly unique setting just enough to keep you invested.
If you know you like this kind of game and want another one to sink some time into with enough of a different story to be interesting but not any significant difference in the gameplay mechanics and flow to make it feel like a unique game. Then I don't see why you couldn't enjoy this game if non of the con's are gamebreaking for you.

Hope this review helps someone.