I purchased Hardland on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2015, at 9:30 PM EST. I bought it because it had a great name. "Hardland." It evokes a lot. It was also on sale. The game took fifteen minutes to install.

I clicked through some menus and cutscenes. I was in control of an avatar that bore little resemblance to me. I could press keys on my keyboard and move my mouse to control the square little man and make him do things like walk around and swing a sword. I pressed keys to make him walk to a big swirling vortex.

I wandered for a bit, exploring. There were trees and rocks and other forest things. There were giant apples. They had words over them that said GIANT APPLES and they had a health bar so maybe they were enemies. I could attack them with my sword and eventually they would explode into an impossible number of giant apple slices. You could walk up to chickens and they would say "Bwock, bwock!" Perhaps a political reference? It's hard to say either way.

There were some pigs, both big and small. I killed the pigs with my sword, and then some other animals. The sword makes a satisfy ssssswop sound when it connects, but the sound effect isn't at all dynamic so it becomes trance inducing through persistent repetition. I found some people and killed them too. If you hit someone with your sword, their name turns red and they run away. But only for a few seconds. Then they forget that they should be scared of you and you can just walk up and strike them with the sword again. You can keep doing this until they die.

When people are killed things fall out of them. Cinnamon rolls, potatoes, forks, torches, hats, large bottles of poison, three-tiered fondant cakes. All sorts of things. I'm not sure what these people intended to do with all these things. I just left them on the ground.

You don't run very fast, so it takes a long time to go from one village to another to find villagers. Perhaps the players should be able to kill someone and take their shoes and different shoes let you move at different speeds. Again, this is an early access game, and a lot can change, so maybe the developers have already thought of this.

While I was looking for the next village I found a knight named Bald Travis and I put him in the ground. That is to say: I hit him and he fell over stiffly and his upper torso clipped through the ground. His squiggly disproportionate feet stuck up like marigolds. All the people in this game are oddly dysmorphic. They are all short, stout, thick. It makes me think about why my own body is constructed the way it is, which is something I don't like to do.

I wandered some more. There was a boar stuck inside a tree, like the tree had grown through him, but he was still alive and thrashing violently. His name was Raggi the Maneater. I went over to try and help him, but merely making contact with him seemed to be fatal. My body went limp and a dozen bejeweled crowns exploded from within me. There was also one quarter of a watermelon and my quiet, un-beating heart.

At that point I decided I had played enough to form a proper assessment of all the game had to offer. This is a work in progress, and there isn't enough polish to hold my attention. It feels like there's a lot of obvious areas to improve upon. I wish I could remove people's shoes when they die, or otherwise dress them how I wanted. I wish the animals said more things when you talked to them. I wish there were mini-games, like maybe you mash keys and fill a meter to put a sleeper hold on a villager. Those are all things that would make a much more engaging experience for a player like me. But for now, Hardland seems aimless and unnecessary.