Recent reviews by moodragonx74

good game

The more I play this game the more I realize I think it's just bad. It does a good job of being a poor imitation of a lot of other games. It feels like the gameplay mechanics were designed in concept but never playtested to work out whether systems would be intuitive or frustrating or horribly tedious and every time I want to give something the benefit of the doubt I am disappointed.

The writing and setting are generally interesting though and I have suffered through several hours of shoddy gameplay in pursuit of delving deeper into the lore and am now resolving to just stop and cut my losses here. There's so many better ways I could be using my time.

If you're on the fence, I would highly encourage you to pick one of the plethora of other great farming/crafting/life sim games out there and just don't waste your time on this one.

Don't know how to put my feelings to words but I really wanted to enjoy this game. I'll probably still go back and try to get a bit more out of it but I didn't enjoy my nearly 20 hours with it so far.
I feel like I didn't really feel motivated to do anything in the game, just finding myself feeling obligated to start trying to grind crafting ingredients and relationship points with while putting up with some clunky systems.

The English translation really hurts it's playability for English speakers - I want to get into it but I'm really taken out of the game when the dialogue is broken.

I'd love to try this again if they improve the translation.

The story isn't earth-shatteringly deep, but the love interests are all characterized well. There is some plot intrigue but the framing storing and "main" plot isn't the real point - the individual character stories are where all the depth is and each of them have something real to tell which I enjoyed.

The English voice acting in particular really won me over as surprisingly good and didn't make me cringe. It's a lot of what got me genuinely invested in some of the characters (and despise certain others *cough* *cough* *Cassie*).

The art is... mixed, I'd say. Overall it's pretty good but in the H-scenes there are some strange inconsistencies, I think having something to do with this game being a spin-off/adaption of an earlier game by the studio? My guess is some of the animated CGs were pulled from their previous title, "Crush Crush".

The main thing I want to highlight this game for, is the gameplay.

It has a stat raising, time management, money management system like in Persona or certain other dating sims.

This gameplay is again nothing incredible or revolutionary but I find this style of VN to be really fun. Rather than just being on rails and just (sometimes) choosing which of a pair of tracks you want to go down when you get to a branching choice, I really enjoy the calendar-based "choose how you want to spend you limited time and resources" sort of gameplay style.

Anyway, hope some more people discover this game as I think as far as US-produced VNs go, it really stands out.

This game is astonishingly broken. I am going through a co-op play through and we can laugh off the jank and the balance issues. But if I were playing this on my own I'd have given up on this a long time ago.

This game is right up my alley. Balancing really fun shop keeping mechanics, deck building, time management elements for just a really fun game to play. On top of that the dialogue and description writing is all just really impressive, nothing comes off as cringey or forced, it's really good. And to top it all off the graphics are so surprisingly polished for a title like this.

I'm so surprised this game didn't have more hype leading up to it because it's blown me out of the water.

I will admit I'm partial to gameplay incentives of trying to maximize your earnings in a limited period of time - I always try to maximize my profits in stardew valley - and others have complained that it can be more stressful than they are looking for from a game but I don't think this game is unreasonable in it's difficulty. It expects you not to waste your time but you don't have to get lucky or min-max especially hard to hit the required potion progress. Instead, you just need to be balancing your potion making and shop running with your limited time. If you spend all week just hanging out with friends, you won't pay off your loan, this shouldn't really come as a surprise.

Still, I do think given the feedback it would make a lot of sense for the devs to add a "relaxed" gameplay mode which adds 50-100% to the competition timers so that people have more time to go at their own pace if they want, but I personally think it would risk getting boring quickly as you fully exhaust your list of things you can do and are just running out the clock.

Anyway, consider this a huge double thumbs up for me. I think there's a lot of love about this game.

I want to love this game. I should love it. But the first hour of gameplay or so has seriously turned me off.
The game doesn't setup any of the narrative or mechanics effectively, there's no explanation as to how or why we are partnering with these figments, why we're in combat with things, how we got where we are. I understand the main character is supposed to have amnesia but the lack of any context before you're thrown into what feels more like a tech demo than a actual start of a game is jarring and disappointing.
The combat is trivial so far but I imagine it could become more sophisticated over time, I'm just really disappointed in the inattention to detail put into the gameplay so far when it's visually so promising.

I have nothing new to add. It's a game that has resparked popular interest in and harvest-moon-esque farming simulators and countless clones. It's good, and the 1.5 update is a pretty nice improvement to quality of life and some additional content to keep you going.

Multiplayer is a pretty good time if you've got other interested partners. This is one of the few games I've able to convince a play group to join in on.

The closest analogue of game I've played is Subnautica, which for me is a major compliment. Mainly in how both games excel at building incredible foreign worlds where exploration of those worlds is the main gameplay challenge.
However, I think this game in a lot of ways exceeds Subnautica's benchmark.

I recommend this game highly and I recommend you go into it blind.
I also recommend you avoid any guides/walkthroughs as much as possible but if you're like me and find one or two things that really stump you, this spoiler-free FAQ on the steam community guides section is very helpful at nudging you along without taking the fun out of it https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2160452487 .