Recent reviews by Varpie

While not perfect, this is a nice laid back game with some farming, crafting and exploration. I would recommend getting it on sale.

A great party game, super fun to play with friends. I used to play it on a friend's Nintendo Switch, and it is a perfect fit for my Steam Deck.
With Remote Play Together, you can even play it remotely with friends who do not own the game!

The game itself has interesting mechanics (instead of exploring an unknown world, you build it yourself by creating terrain tiles), but there are multiple things that make this game a tough sell:

- poor storytelling: the player starts in a nice little cabin with everything they need, but has to create a simple shelter right next to it, then destroy the nice cabin. It feels forced on the user as part of the tutorial, but provides nothing of value and just doesn't feel good. Similarly, some crafting recipes don't really make sense (crafting a pickaxe with only wood, but the final product has a proper blade).
- I cannot see it be challenging or interesting enough to keep it interesting for hours. Quests typically require crafting a specific terrain tile, which means there will be a lot of resource gathering, but there won't be any discoveries: you know what you put, and where you put it. The night can be skipped by sleeping, which can be done either at your shelter or a camp, and zombies are not impressive during the day.
- Last but not least, the game is poorly optimized. It is a low poly game, but even on low settings it uses more resources than most games I play. A battery killer if you play on a laptop or Steam Deck.

Overall, a nice short exploration game with a disappointing ending

- I like the low poly graphics, the world is very clean. Even the NPC dialog boxes look neat. Overall, I just find it graphically pleasing.
- Interesting approach to the story line. The very few characters don't tell you much about the story of the world, mostly helping you finish the game and pointing out where you should go, but you find scrolls and carved stones all around the world that introduce what you happened in this world, and why previously populated lands have now become mostly deserted floating islands.
- Good level design: the puzzles are intuitive enough that they don't need to be explained, the platforming phases make good use of terrain to have some sort of checkpoints (unless you really mess up), the progression in the caves or temples feels overall nice.

- Very lacking ending. You have this long walk where The Void gets hyped up, saying you're all on your own, and expect to have a big fight, or since it is more of an exploration game than an action one, a difficult puzzle or platforming challenge to defeat it, but in the end... it is just a short cinematic. After having those major entities that basically created and maintained the world give up their life to save it, it feels underwhelming.
- It is good overall but not great at anything. The puzzles are simple, but not really challenging. The world is nice, but quite small as it takes a few minutes to get from one side to the other. The world's history becomes interesting, but because the game is so short, it leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
- Flying is great, so when you can't it feels slow. Especially in the caves where you have to go back to the start of the cave after doing what you went there for. And you can't really change your direction when you jump (which makes sense, but isn't often the case is video games), so it can mess up jumps on moving platforms.
- Very limited options: no controls menu (good thing I had a controller, since I'm not using a QWERTY keyboard), which also means that you don't really have a way to remind you how to fly or open the lamp. Fortunately, you only really use 2 buttons, but it can also be a bit confusing: the jump/action button sometimes makes you jump instead of activating a puzzle element.
- I had a black screen when starting the game. Thankfully, it could be fixed by adding an option to the launch command, but if someone didn't mention it on the discussions on Steam, I would probably not have been able to play.

I really want to like it, because this game has a lot of good points, but there are too many small things that make it difficult for no reason.

- The 3 dwarves have a drastically different gameplay, and interesting interactions with each other.
- Depending on how you approach a situation, the outcome will be drastically different. There is a bit of interactivity with the environment, and different relationships between the species that create strategic choices.
- The graphics are quite nice, adding to the immersion.

- The dwarves are not well balanced. Smashfist is basically useless when surrounded by swamp and large enemies, all he can do is say "this ability is not effective in swamp" and "I can't control this enemy". Also since his gameplay revolves around going in the middle of a fight and attacking everyone, it limits the strategic options a lot (unlike the others, no bait ability or long range attack that could make use of the environment, to control the paths of enemies and avoid them).
- The camera feels clunky: you can't control the angle or move freely, only rotate around the dwarf currently selected.
- Very limited options menu, and a bit buggy too: I tried to rebind some keys and was told that one of the keys was already used even though it is not in the given list, and I couldn't go back or anything, had to close the game. No option to always have the alt key pressed by default, or to show all the enemies vision when you press alt either, which would be greatly appreciated.
- The richness of the environment makes it difficult to see what is usable or not. Is that huge root a path or just decoration? Guess I'll have to go there and see. Where does the bush stop hiding me? I'll have to try it out. Oh, so that bunch of branches is not part of the bush? Well, I guess the enemies see me now... Some blocks where you can't walk also don't block enemy vision for some unknown reason.
- Dumb pathing. When I take my dwarves from point A to point B and there are obvious "traps", why can't they avoid them although I have been avoiding them for the past 5 minutes when micro-managing them in the same area?
- I can't understand how the resources are shared. The dwarven stones, when collected by a single dwarf, will be redistributed between all dwarves, but it is especially annoying when you want an upgrade that costs 3 stones and all the stones you get on a level are given to the two other dwarves.
- Achievements are mostly not working, when they involve a counter. Killing all the enemies of a given type in a level won't give you the achievement for killing 5 of them, for instance, the counter will say you killed 3 when you killed roughly 15.
- Annoying voice "tip". "I see this objective, I need to go there without being noticed", yes Shadow I know, I'm working my way there, just wait for the ability to go off cooldown and I'll move to the next bush. There we g-"I see this objective. I need to go there without be-" yes yes I'm going. "I see this..." Oh come on you weren't even done talking, did you really have to repeat it? (and of course no option to disable that)
- Confusing interface. When a tutorial instruction appears on your screen, you have to press the pause/next button, but nothing indicates it in the beginning, and pressing escape doesn't do anything... and when they indicate it, somehow it also pauses the game even though it didn't before? When upgrading your suit, you need to double click, but nothing indicated it, and somehow it need to be a fast double click, so sometimes I'd end up clicking something 5 times to get it selected. Overall, a lack of explanations regarding how thing work, I spent way too long trying to get a sneak kill with Shadow by moving one step at a time and hoping it wouldn't be detected, before I understood that the hush ability can be triggered at will and doesn't need to be fully charged. And why does the execution icon shows up but attacking still does a bow attack, that doesn't execute the enemy? That makes the game better played by pausing constantly to micro manage your units and make sure they do the right things, which kind of kills the real time aspect of it.
- Quick save sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Oh no, I just died, the save was just before this cinematic. Well, let me just quick save after that so that next time I don't have to lose some time skipping the cinematic again. Oh, I still have it...
- Enemy detection is not consistent. Here, let me attack you from this bush, far away. Now you're just confused and checking the closest bush, even though you lost half your HP. Now, let's kill someone in front of you, you are alerted but just check a couple of bushes and give up. Now let's kill someone else. Why is everyone alerted and directly coming to my bush that isn't the closest, and chasing me around for 5 minutes?

Some good ideas, and a game that overall has a lot of potential, but so many little things that make it annoying, so unfortunately I can't recommend it. It would greatly benefit from a more in depth tutorial, rather than getting directly started and having to discover how to do everything by trial and error (and too often error not because of your strategic choices but because of some unexplained gameplay mechanics).

Puzzles are very hard ( way harder than average ones on Portal 1/2 ) but damn, it could have been Portal 3. Except it's not Chell.