Really didn't like this one. At first, I was excited to play a spiritual successor to Forager, since this game really is just Forager: Again with minor differences, and at first I was telling myself that this is even better than that game was, but I quickly grew to dislike more or less everything about it. Everything you can do in this game feels problematic somehow.

So, the good parts is that it looks cute enough, controls well enough and I like that there's a little communal island where new characters move in after you help them build a house. I like a museum in any game that has them. I liked that you can build saddles and ride some of the animals.

Everything else, though... You start with a painfully miniscule inventory, which is a problem because this game makes you feel like you're in 2007 by completely ignoring materials in your stashes. You MUST be carrying the material to use it, which just does not work with the game giving you a tiny inventory and I have no idea how that slipped past the developers. Did they not notice the pain in the ass amounts of moving things back and forth and putting them in stash and taking it out? How? I can only assume that all playtesting was done with an infinite inventory or something dumb like that, because the pathetic storage both on your character and what you can manage to build really is a major problem that's bothersome throughout almost the entire game. Only by endgame do you have enough upgraded inventory slots for this not to be problematic, and you can't rush that since the unlocks are progression based.

Second major problem is bot behavior and the fact that their behavior means that it's actually detrimental to build too many factories. I hate that! I want these silly little engineer games to be all about building a stupid amount of factories churning out a stupid amount of resources, but this game doesn't work out like that because of a stupid oversight in bot code. The bots don't work actively all the time; instead, the couriers are coded to only fill up factory machines when they're almost out, as opposed to filling them to full as often as possible. This leads to massive congestion everywhere along the supply chain. I constantly felt stressed out because this bot behavior meant that I was seeing massive piles of unused materials, which leads to bots not working since the gatherer bots are also too stupid to just dynamically store things where you have storage available. No, they can ONLY use the one stash you tell them to use, and bigger stashes are a very late-game unlock. Furthermore, this congestion really isn't helped by how slow factory machines are, and how long it takes for any endgame material to be created, even with max-level upgrades and the best lubricant (which makes machines faster) and so on. Logistics bots take forever to empty production machines and put them into other producers, because they think they should deliver at the last possible second instead of ASAP, and the machines themselves also take forever, causing everything down the line to slow to sometimes a complete halt. I often found myself having to run to check my supposedly "automated" system to clean up work for the bots so that production could resume, and I really don't think that this is by design. Like this isn't a wacky "your machines keep breaking" type game where things constantly break and you're struggling comically to keep things running. It's just not designed right for what it's trying to be.

I think you can tweak your little factory to be perfect by figuring out the exact amount of production machines you can use to find a balance between bot behavior and production rate, but I just really didn't want to put in that work. This is such a small 10-hour game that's inspired by Forager and is supposed to be a not-that-serious engineering game where you produce ridiculous amounts of material. Basically, you're supposed to just be able to keep building more and more factories and see your production soar, but that cannot be done in this game because of stupid bot behavior. You must build, experiment, streamline, destroy and re-build and I just don't want to make that time investment here.

It doesn't help that certain endgame materials were a total and illogical pain to automate. For example, you get a farm where you can house captured animals to receive their material, which makes sense and is easy to explain. So, in order to get the honey eggs (made by birdbees) to feed the lizards so you can get the lizard scale required for plastic, you just capture a few birdbees and put them in a ranch, right? Haha, no, because that would make sense and this game doesn't roll like that. No, in order to "automate" this incredibly important resource (because everything uses plastic), you have to like "encourage" the birdbee queen to build nests in your farmed trees by placing animal feeders next to your orchard. I couldn't tell you the rest of the process because I couldn't get it to work, and I couldn't see an option to tell my gatherer bots to at least collect eggs for me, like how they can collect berries and other similar items, so I just ended up painstakingly gathering them by hand every time. This was not fun and I only did it because the game is kind of short and I didn't want to leave the trophies 80% complete, so I powered through the final 5 or so hours of painstaking labor to get the minimum amount required of each resource just to be done with the game.

Oh, and that's another thing. Like 4.5 of the final 5 hours of this game were a complete idle game for me. As in I literally left the game running while doing house work for most of my sunday. I did that because the major endgame mechanic this game is sleeping. I'm not kidding. The big-time unlock you get in the final phase of the game is a house, which you can decorate in order to boost your production bonus while sleeping. The dev's big idea for endgame is that you're just supposed to give up, go to sleep and let the machines keep producing the final few, and extremely slow, things you need to produce in order to complete the final challenges and trophies. And, as you might have already guessed, the bonus is pathetic and poorly thought-out, because you don't get like a percentage boost to production. No, instead you get a system like "Get 1 bonus for every 10 produced", which makes no sense because that will ONLY boost the already common materials. The rare production that takes forever and only produces one unit an hour does not get boosted by sleeping whatsoever, and that's just...so dumb. The devs gave up on finishing their game so hard that they expect you to just follow suit and give up too. And, in hindsight, I can't quite believe that they brainwashed me into doing it, but hey, at least I got some housework done because of it.

Oh, right, you might have heard about the enticing space station in this game. Sounds like a cool improvement, right? Yeah, no, it sucks too. Spacewalking sucks and it's so impressively dumb that the game uses up the backup reserve before emptying your suit, which means that buying upgrades for your space suit does nothing because you can't choose to detach from the tether. It's equally as dumb that you're not allowed to do anything whatsoever with the early space gems after you've used them for exactlty four upgrades. Can't sell those or do anything with them after that, so spacewalks are just you flying past like 30 screens to get to the gems you actually need by that point. The space station itself is obviously unfinished, as there are still empty room slots available when you finish the game. As with everything else, the devs just gave up and stopped working once they were in the final stretch.

No, sir, this game just plain sucks. It's short, it's easy, it's sloppy, it's lazy, it's unfinished and it's often quite boring because of all of these things. Not to gatekeep, but I feel like most if not all positive reviews for this game were first impressions based on how it can be a little fun (aside from the pesky inventory) in the early hours, written by people who haven't gotten far enough to realize that more or less everything about this game is annoying or stupid. Or annoying AND stupid.

i really enjoyed this up until endgame where it became very very slow and tedious, the game literally has a function for you to idle and i just feel like i dont want to be playing a game where i have to leave it open for an hour in order to progress. i havent finished this and i kind of cant because the game literally will not open. like it crashes on startup and Refuses to open. which sucks and could just be a me issue but i also read about this game data mining and being generally poorly optimised so who knows. anyways this was fun for a while! not something id come back to

There's a charming and intentional minimalism at play here, from the limited number of bots and islands to the lack of stats presented through the interface and lack of combat. Sometimes the minimalism drives so far it leaves you without any understanding because it is fundamentally a bit buggy and unpolished, but: i spent 20 hours on it, it's a great steam deck game, and while it didn't really give me anything fundamentally new to the genre, it gave me enough to chew on and consider what is truly important for supply line/automation games and what isn't.