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Chants of Sennaar is a fantastic deductive reasoning game in the same vein of The Case of the Golden Idol and the Return of the Obra Dinn.

The two frustrations in the game that betray the genre are some limited stealth sections in the middle and end of the game as well as a nasty math puzzle that made me write 1405, 812, and 46 on an external notepad. The game has an extensive in game journal that serves as your primary method of progress and being unable to log these three numbers after discovering them was it's only failing.

These two accessibility limiting blemishes aside; The game is a clever and uplifting experience that I would recommend to almost anyone even non-game inclined folk. It has a pleasant soundtrack clean and simple visuals that give each culture you encounter it's own vivid texture.

8/10

The game is about 5 hours of puzzle content with twice as much filler.

The capstone of this filler is at the end where a hub to three puzzles require you to get three mcmuffin pieces. Each spoke in the hub has a long unskippable travel sequence to a separate puzzle level. Once complete you must trudge back carrying a heavy object to a gondola up through a loading door to place the object then immediately walk back through the same loading door to ride the slow gondola back.

The puzzle quality has diminished when compared to previous entries in the Were Here series. The most memorable one I took issue with required one person to submit items one at a time to hear their description. So it literally couldn't be solved except by trial and error submitting one item at a time until finding the one that makes sense.

All told I feel that the increase in production "value" decreased the overall experience. Taller ceilings, greater environmental detail, and longer cutscenes made the experience of solving puzzles with a friend more frustrating. Especially when the design was compromised to slowly show off one of the value elements. I was completely willing to tolerate the poor visuals in previous games as none of the visuals in this one were worth the cost in time.

Sparse and frustrating

I love this game 9/10.

It is an excellent chill business grinding game like Recettear or Stardew Valley. Each has management element and an action element and Dave the Diver's action element blows those legendary games out of the water. All while having a similarly charming and fun management element on par with Rec and Stardew. My only gripes are little nitpicks about the way that the management element fails to automate tedious tasks and is more complicated than necessary.

=Everything below this point is the little things that I think make the overall game fall short of perfection=
FARMING
The normal farm is expensive to scale up. I beat the final boss on day 33 and didn't manage to get the land farm producing at a volume that would make leveling recipes practical.
The sea people farm is great but comes at the minor cost that you must carry all of the grown food for the day that you pick it up. Potentially losing the entire harvest if you get killed by a shark on your run. We know they can swim to the surface. It would be an improvement if they could ship it to you.
The Fish Farm SUCKS! At the beginning of every day you need to visit a series of menus to sell or harvest all your excess fish. They bind an entire button to selling or harvesting everything when the button everyone needs is harvest all BUT the two highest star of each fish. When you use the harvest all button it even warns you that you are screwing yourself. So fish farming is taking a boat to a room where you interact with 7 spreadsheets where you adjust the numbers on every cell one at a time. The menu even has unique key binds to master for performing the operation quickly. It still isn't game play. I loved collecting two 3* of every fish. I hated not knowing what Roe if any I was collecting or knowing what rate fish were growing or if expanding early produced more fish than leaving it at 99%.

THE SUSHI RESTAURANT
Platinum rank secretly adds $2000 to your daily operating costs! Diamond rank secretly increases this cost to $5000! Ranking to Bronze, Silver, and Gold are all beneficial and should be gotten as fast as possible. You should sandbag on upgrading to platinum as long as you can. Normally low level workers have poor performance but low wages making for an even incline where you can afford to sell crappy low level fish and grow as you want. Once you hit platinum it creates a floor where every fish you sell needs to be worth $290 per piece to make the extra customers from platinum break even. MOST of the recipes in the entire game even at rank 10 do not generate $290 per unit.

The optimal strategy is to spam your best recipe endlessly every night. This is a problem by itself. Platinum and later diamond force that strategy even if you weren't done with messing around with your menu. Reaching platinum makes night diving more costly as it is $2000 every night even if you spent a third of it under water.

Picking the correct employees requires referencing a guide or making incredibly expensive trial an error. Money you need good employees to get.

FISHING GUNS
The weapon crafting and upgrade system is hamstrung by unnecessary gold costs and too many overlapping options. The entire game can and should be played with a Level 1 Tranq Rifle for most of the run through. Live caught fish and their secret roe are more than THREE TIMES more valuable than dead ones. This makes most of the guns and their elemental variants useless and expensive ways to fail.

Upgrading weapons requires a bunch of gathered resources that are fun to collect. Unfortunately because weapon upgrades also come with a hefty price tag they create an unnecessary opportunity cost. The stats of weapons are secret unless you expensively explore the tree and the end result is one minor variation on 18 ways to ruin fish. Fish should be weak to and stunned by a different element making live capture possible with more than just Tranq.

Because you have no control of your Melee weapon or your Harpoon your gun MUST cover a universal role further narrowing the options to just sticking with the Tranq rifle. Leveling up guns in your inventory doesn't make them more powerful when found underwater so there is zero benefit to expanding your arsenal especially because gold costs rob the other game systems of growth. The game is great with a Tranq rifle I just wish the other options were less costly and more viable.

It is indie Warship Gunner II. A quick textureless reminder of hundreds of hours of sitting in front of my PS2 in my youth. It is a short trip down memory lane and doesn't need eat multiple summers like it's predecessor did.

A solid 8/10

The 147 hours of play time is a bit misleading. I took the time to grind resources and get 100% collectibles and did so inefficiently. The game has about 40 hours of good content stretched over 70. I appreciate the hand crafted nature of the final version of the backyard but it clashes with the survival oriented game play loop. Lategame resources in the upper yard are not sufficient for even a single character without multiple days of map resets and resource runs. Toenails as an example require 5 to beat the game and 10 to make a sword but only have 9 spawn points in a map.

The game also seems conflicted between being a 4 player co-op game and a single player adventure. Most of the rewards for exploration are completely unique and never re-spawn creating unnecessary conflict in a co-op environment where only one player gets the trinket or is permitted to upgrade their stuff.

The effect of early access seems to have taken it's tole on the development as the best gameplay experiences are in the early game exploration of the lower yard but the damage mechanics and build progression is locked behind a really frustrating midboss and the final tier of gear. Overall I had a good time with Grounded but it wasn't a constantly good time and enjoyment tapered off near the end.

What if environmental storytelling were a game?

The case of the Golden Idol is in the same style of game as Return of the Obra Dinn and in my opinion surpasses it. It regularly leaves multiple ways to arrive at the same deduction allowing you to solve each of the connected mysteries in whatever way you connected the dots. Unlike Obra Dinn it is separated into small chunks in a timeline rather than one big interconnected event. This small change makes it easier to stop and resume where It would otherwise be daunting and disorienting to solve all in one sitting.

It is monster hunter flavored pokemon. The game starts out easy but has the right amount of crunchy depth to let you make a team of your favorite monsters or really power game an optimal team.

I give it a 4/10. It is a Newgrounds level point and click adventure game with only one way to solve most of the puzzles. The pisser is if you complete the puzzles in the wrong order you lock yourself out of some of them because it steals your tool. There is no way to know and you can still stumble forward to the bad end but this seems entirely built to force you into replaying the very short game.

There is no save system and no way to retry most puzzles so if you mess up you need to replay the entire game up to that point to try again. I got all but one achievement on my first play through and the final one is a puzzle 70% into the game that you only get to try once.

Quirky art style is only skin deep and barely animated. It is basically an ad for their other games.

The 7days to die loop of exploring and collecting resources in trader generated missions sets the game apart from the glut of random crafting survival games. It is far from realistic and occasionally ugly and janky as hell. The ability to break your friends into roles and contribute to a common goal is such an important part of the fun it should be shouted from the mountain tops.

This is a great Co-Op Survival game with friends.
This is a middling shell of it's potential solo or with randoms.