Recent reviews by kohlrak

I dare say "no" with the caveat that it's very early access. SLGs tend to pull in casual players, but this game is far from that. It's not a roguelike as everyone seems to classify it, but rather roguelite. That said, even right now it's a decent game, but it's really rough, and absolutely not for the crowd that it outwardly appears to be trying to appeal to.

Frankly, the worst sin is the incentives are all wrong. The game tells you that for the first 90 days, you got kid gloves on: you don't suffer penalties for dying. That said, you're most likely going to end up hitting these penalties, because the ability to avoid this and your pet constantly dying early on is by, well, choosing the little girl as a pet. The other options don't make sense, because everything is balanced against the OP choice, which also isn't indicated as such.

You know taxes are coming, it tells you, so what does it do to prepare you? Well, any normal person would be prioritizing abandoning the tutorials in order to actually solve that problem, because it does come up on you quick. This is actually the wrong path of thinking, which the game kinda warns you about, but there's a tutorial and you better follow it with top priority, even over your cahracter's life, except that not everything is going to appear in rank order of difficulty. You get 2 quests that send you into dungeons before you have equipment: once again, it warns you.... when you get to the dungeon, that you should go buy equipment with the money that you don't have (and are saving up for the taxes).

The list goes on: the problem is where the game shines: there's loads of freedom. You can do anything the engine permits, including some morally shady things. The problem is, despite appealing to a casual audience, there are certain "right decisions" that must be made early on in order to prevent it from becoming a nightmare. Most of them have hints, but some of the biggest ones actually have no hints as to what they are. They acknowledge the problem with a 90-day grace period on deaths (more or less accepting you're going to die and die alot). If the first settlement's tax box were given for free so that you wouldn't end up having to make a long trek under-equipped and if the dungeon delving quests were trapped behind an equipment quest) and if hostile mobs couldn't raid your starting base, all would be fine.

Food is and isn't a problem, at the same time. Like money, you'll be going for it first thing, for a while, until you've come to accept that going from on top of the world to getting trapped in inevitably deadly scenarios is a single right click away (either auto-battle or default action of an item).

But like i said, it's not a bad game: it's basically nethack without permadeath (unless you enable it) and less YAFM/TDTTOE and the ability to craft and build. It's a sort of early-access cozyhack, if you will. It just needs to work some kinks out of its early game.

Oh, and for the love of god, give us the option to swap middle-mouse with right-click. I get what you're going for, but this is not even remotely intuitive, especially for people who've been using right click for years in everything that isn't your game. I've been aware of it for hours and still can't break the habbit.

Needs alot of QoL and balancing, and account data needs way, way better handling (valheim/terraria style would be nice, you can't stop cheaters anyway).

Linux support added. Can now play these classics again. But coop is broken on certain levels in certain games, and not just for linux. Only buy if you plan on playing alone.

Get it on sale, but it's a decent game. Made with gamemaker studio, so in theory can be made drm-free which i'll have to do at some point.