Recent reviews by Iron

Prefacing this saying I'm a sucker for "digging slop" games. I "cleared" all the dirt in a game about digging a hole and one man's trash, and I cleared every trash mountain in this game. I got most of the cards, and I got all the birds and upgrades. I also don't care if there's AI in a game - the music was funny, and I've never been heartbroken by it's use in a game so that isn't impacting this review. I still don't recommend this for a lot of reasons.

It's terribly optimised, to start. You need to play on the lowest setting, and it doesn't autosave - you need to do that manually. You can't zone out, because you'll be clearing a landslide of rubbish, chug a can, and lose about 30 minutes of progress when the entities on the screen crash it. Saving can also crash it. On a mechanical note - you cannot rebind keys. E calls the trolley to you, and you will mix it up and get annoyed when the trolley spawns in front of the card cleaning station.

The trolley mechanic is terrible. You can't put trash bags into it to transport, and most of the treasure has broken collisions when you're putting them in, so they'll bug and fly out. Even at the largest upgrade.

Speaking of upgrades, the upgrades aren't meaningful and the increments aren't good enough to feel like you're actually making progress with them. I maxed mine out, and it still felt very grindy. I didn't mind that personally, but you do have to stand in front of the vending machine spamming the mouse button to buy 300+ beer in one go before you take on the next pile of rubbish you unlock. To it's credit, you can't be soft-locked. It will let you go in the minuses if you need to buy another pile of rubbish and you don't have enough.

You can't throw your trash bags all the way from one side of the map to the other with the maximum power upgrade, which is irritating since trash bags despawn so you lose money. I assume that's what power is for, because the game tells you very little about anything. You also cannot move the bin or buy closer bins. I wish that was an option.

The bird collectables are bugged. You get more birds than there are nests if you clear the map - so you're just stuck with orbs you can't do anything about. Conversely, you can't collect all the cards, especially if you get doubles. They're finite and randomly generated. That will annoy some people. A small personal gripe is I also disliked the "streamer" cards - partly because it felt like a gimmick to make content creators play it, partly because half the cards are of terrible people. This game will age terribly if any more controversies about people come out.

The dog sucks. Love him, but he sucks. Pointless mechanic - I wish you could feed him for no reason, or he could bring the treasure to the shelf directly. It's very counter-intuitive having you need to grab it, because then like... why didn't I just grab it myself and let the dog chill?

Last gripe: there's no end or conclusion. A game about digging a hole was nice - there was an end that you felt satisfied getting. This just... keeps going. There's no end. You're in an empty yard with an incomplete collection, a lot of money, all the upgrades, your dog and some bird spheres rolling around on the floor. I finished it because I'm a sick freak that loves these games, but there are better versions of this kind of thing that you should absolutely try first. It's cheap, so get it if you're desperate for this kind of game, but you'll be mildly frustrated the whole time. Yeah. Bit of a rant but felt like I needed to pipe up because I'm not normal about games like this and I still didn't enjoy myself.

Fun little idle game - it gets pretty advanced pretty quickly for anybody fresh into coding with no history like me. I wish there was more to the troubleshooter and more easily accessible than it is (sometimes getting to the troubleshooter is harder than the issue you're facing, and then reading it is difficult). Fortunately, steam is full of nerds and there was plenty of help online in the discussions and guides on how to get all the achievements and skill tree fairly painlessly - and then it's just a nice idle time waster. Short, mind you.

Cute, short little shop keeper game. Very similar to Shoppe Keep 2 if you enjoyed that, including an open world to go find stock to sell. I wish it was slightly longer because the loan was a very small amount so a mod for that would be cool, and the fishing update lowkey kinda broke the economy because there's no incentive to make the cute little meals and "better" products because they sell for less than the raw products used to make them. But it was a nice time waster. I enjoyed myself. If there was more to the game, I'd play more.

This is a maybe that's edging on the side of negative because it's a lesson in patience and frustration which I don't really want from a cozy game. I wouldn't pay full price, and I'd only buy it if you like stuff like "A little to the left" and NOT unpacking.

I'm going to be mean and brief: glitchy, buggy, clunky, assets are reused multiple times very often (the same assets used in Lost But Found and Ship Inc which I think is seriously lazy because you're just churning out buggy games!), you "unpack" and then it gives you more stuff in staggered amounts so you never know how much you're placing until it's awkward and cluttered, when it gives you move stuff, it might be hidden in the environment or not "correctly" sat somewhere so the game just waits for you in silence and leaves you thinking it's bugged.I had tutorials on, but it was so minimalistic and unhelpful with no direction. The puzzles between organising levels are childish and just padding, and there's often not enough stuff to fill the levels (for example, the vending machine isn't "full" like the trailer shows).

Yeah. Nah. I'm done with this dev now.

I've only known Masha for 2 hours but if anything happened to her, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.

Very cute, cozy game. Wish the tutorial was a little more in depth because it took me way too long to realise I could alter flower shape and buy wraps, but I'm enjoying myself with it. Even when you do it "wrong", the customers are still nice about it. No time limit, no pressures. Just you, some pretty flowers and nice customers. At the same time, the game still gets harder - some orders are complicated, and you need to buy a lot so the progression is there.

Yeah. Would be a nice cozy game for a stream for a couple hours, or just something to put on in the background whilst you watch TV.

Reviewed for the updated Beta: I now FIRMLY don't recommend it - at any price. I wanted to give it another shot when I saw the achievements. I felt like there was direction. I felt like it was trying to be something more. But it is RIDDLED with bugs, to the point that it is unplayable. I played for an hour, and it crashed CONSTANTLY - leaving me paranoid and manually saving because there is no autosave. I made a new save in case it was the fact I played on 3.0's beta causing the crashes, this time on Cozy mode. Cozy mode does not work, it's a pointless tickbox. I changed it in the menu, quit in and quit out, tried multiple saves. When I changed the cozy mode in the main menu? It deleted all my save files. All of them.

Not to mention the other reviewers issues: farmer AI is terrible, disorganised and broken, building movement is frustrating and temperamental, often breaking your buildings entirely and deleting them. The game progression is MUCH slower than it ever used to be, and as another user says - slower does not mean it's better.

Since my previous review below, this dev has quite frankly destroyed a lack-lustre, yet competent game. He's broken it. It's not only unplayable because of bugs, but it is now so fundamentally and mechanically broken even down to the core gameplay loop, that even if I could persevere through the bugs - the game I liked is no longer here. Don't touch it.

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Very mid, very unfinished, nice concept but I wouldn't recommend it for £11. Getting it for 40% off right now really depends how much money you have to waste on games every month. It's basically a worse "Relaxing Fields" game, which is only £2.50 and a better game.

Charming little game - I preferred it to the devs other games. I completed it in 2 and a half hours, but call it closer to 3 because I played the demo and knew what I was doing. Only gripe is I wish it was longer, and I wish there was a "base stat" organise - I feel like there was in the demo.

Really cute little game. Not much more to say other than I'm looking forward to the rest of the dev's work. Good time waster and cheap - and got me smiling.

I play this game on mute whilst I watch youtube. I'll be honest, I've never heard the soundtrack. But I bought it because I've already got the DLC, it's on sale, it's a direct donation to planned parenthood (Or C.S. Mott Children's Hospital if that isn't your kind of thing) and I've played the main game about 20 hours now - happy to contribute a little more for a good cause and a game which is essentially kinky sudoku.

This game is excellent. It's the best farm sim I've played since Stardew Valley and in many ways, it's actually better than Stardew. Because of that, I'm directly comparing the two in this review because I don't think it's worth talking about the other farming sims on the market. This is better. I even got to the end of the content for the Early Access of this, went to replay Stadrew and said, "Damn, I miss Fields of Mistria."

I prefer the art style in this immensely, and the sprites and characters are fleshed out well. They're not Shane's alcoholism levels of character development yet, but it is a strong starting point. The money making in it is quite difficult, and rewards cooking over simply selling your crops, so it really is a grind. I only got to 50,000 gold in Year 2 Summer. But the grind is a lot easier knowing items persist over-night so you can simply drop items and come pick them back up tomorrow.

The dungeons mechanics are also nice and varied with combat, albeit quite same-y with the environments, and the skill trees with the dragon statues are a nice idea, as is the magic system. Currently both are pretty underdeveloped and I'm sat with all skills on 30 and never use any magic other than the "water everything" power.

The insect system is cute but the legendary insect spawn rates need to be adjusted as it's currently pretty rough to spam-save the hunting. I also appreciate that this doesn't have a fishing mini game beyond the standard Animal Crossing mechanics. The livestock mechanics of different tier animals is also interesting and I'm excited to keep exploring that

It's rough right now of course - there's lots of crashes and there's not THAT much content (especially comparatively to base-Stardew). The controls also highly favour playing with a controller so it makes stuff like harvesting difficult. I'd also like to see some more quality of life options in the menu like Stardew has. And I'd like the romance options to be explored more, or maybe even add a few more guy options (currently I only like March and Eiland, and I'd like more choices so it's not another "Sebastian or Elliot" situation). There's also not much to the story itself and I'd like "more" happening throughout the story with more areas to explore as this feels very contained and small (but I see there's caved in archways, so I'm sure that will come later). Adding to that, I'd like there to be more "Friday Night at the Inn" events that make that more interesting as I found myself looking forward to the inn visits, and I was sad it only went up to 12 weeks.

But hey. I'm already directly comparing this to Stardew - a game that raised the standard for the genre. That's incredibly promising and I see the devs are already making fixes.

100% buy it on sale, or wait for early access to finish, or get it now if you enjoy farm games a lot and have the spare change for it. I'm finding myself playing it until 6am going "oh god, where did the time go", so it scratches the farming sim itch.

Edited/Updated for the steam awards