This game was so much fun, but it's actually also not very good. It's charming and the designers have the right ideas as far as mechanics are concerned, but it's also painfully obvious that this is their first game and that it might have even started as a student project. I kind of loved it, but I have a high tolerance for severe jank if I like the ideas well enough. Beware if you're not like me.

The game itself is kind of a combination of a cleaning sim and a farming game, with a little bit of Slime Rancher DNA thrown in. The planet is full of junk rocks that not only contain junk (which you convert to one of the currencies, recycled material), but also have plant seeds and sometimes crafting blueprints. Your job is to use your magical tool that's a combined water hose, vacuum and drill to both clean up the various areas of the game and to grow crops and care for your animals. This sounds like an amazing combination for people who like all of the above things, but honestly, the only thing that truly works, is fun and is very addictive is the cleaning. It's just kind of exciting to crack open the door to a new area and see a sea of junk rocks and get to work cleaning them out one by one; drilling the rocks until the ground is covered in debris, junk and seeds and then vacuuming it all up. In a few areas, the dreary brown and grey ground is even converted to nice greenery as you clean up the area and complete tasks, which adds even more satisfaction than just seeing the area clean of junk piles.

The farming does start out nice, wich your typical seed lots you can put down and then plant seeds in, and the watering is actually pretty fun from the get-go and I didn't find myself pining for a sprinkler from minute one, as your magical backpack hose actually covers quite a few seed lots at once even without any upgrades, so that was nice. Maintaining like five chickens, five pigs and maybe 30 plants was a nice and manageable amount, but unfortunately, the farming goes off the rails and stops being fun as your farm grows, which never really happens to the cleaning half of the game. That part is addictive the whole way through, because it remains mostly the same except you obtain a better drill and a better vacuum so you can mine and suck faster and more efficiently, but the farming becomes kind of an annoying mess as you proceed. When you have too many animals, they tend to bunch up in one corner and pile on top of each other, making it annoying and stupid to try to fetch your eggs and milk, and the farm area is far too small (with no expansion upgrades offered) for the endgame when you're hosting like 100 plants, 15 pigs, 15 chickens, 15 ducks, 5 cows, 5 goats and 5 sheep, while also trying to maintain room for like 5 apple trees, 5 peach trees, 5 orange trees, the kitchen, the cheesemaker, the jam machine and the mayo machine, while also allowing room for the recycling and crafting stations and the large amount of storage chests you will probably end up building even though there's no actual reason to keep large amounts of vegetables, because the other problem is that there never is any climax to the farming. You have to grow the next set of crops, that become available as you access new areas by completing quests and unlocking paths through the game world, in order to get your tool and machine upgrades, but other than that, there's really not much point in growing 500 potatoes. You can use them to cook a healing meal, but really, this game is so easy and so low-stress and low-challenge that the only thing you'll end up cooking are stamina meals so you can sprint longer and more often.

Other than that, the game is kind of a mess of good ideas and sloppy execution. The tool upgrades are very satisfying and fun, and kept me hooked right by allowing me a stronger drill just as I started to feel a little bored with cleaning up junk and so on, and there were some very fun unlocks like the one that lets you suck all of your fully-grown vegetables into your inventory instead of picking them one by one, but the whole game is very obviously amateurish. No matter where you look, you'll see objects clipping into each other, floating in the air or why not enjoy seeing the skybox in the very obvious and large gaps between the door object and the wall object. That kind of jank is literally in every corner of this game. It doesn't break the game and I managed to complete everything except for one quest (that apparently always breaks if you leave the area before completing it and has been left that way since at least 2022), so the game isn't unplayable, nor did this obvious amateurishness really lower my enjoyment of the game as I was too focused on cleaning on all the things to care that a tree next to me wasn't connected to the ground, but I did have a chuckle when I checked the credits and saw that the game has one director, one "scrum master" (lol what), five "Unity developers" and SEVEN artists. That's insane because if more than half the work force are artists, this game really ought to look much better than it does. I'm guessing maybe this is a student team that took the same class and everyone was hired no matter how bad they actually are at their jobs, which would explain both janky code and bad graphics.

So, yeah, this game is actually kind of bad in many ways, but also very enjoyable since it's never so broken that it becomes unplayable and because it's so satisfying to clean all the things. In fact, I found it so enjoyable that I was excited to hear that they have already made and released a semi-sequel that skips the farming and focuses on cleaning up and restoring nature (it's called Fresh Start) and I bought that right away since it was also on sale when I found out. If you like cleaning sims, don't mind a farming game that's only fun for the first half and then becomes a ridiculous mess, and feel satisfaction in seeing an area of a game go from dirty and awful to clean and green, you might enjoy this game as much as I did even though it's not actually a very good game.