I think I'm done... Paleo Pines begins as a typical farming and friendship simulator, except with the obvious twist that you can befriend, ride and task dinosaurs with everything you would normally do in a game like this. It's a nicely crafted game that plays well for what it is, and the premise is cute fun for a couple of dozen hours, before it becomes too obvious that there's too little to actually do in this game and that it actually becomes more and more dull as you progress.
The game is your typical Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon inspired game where you inherit a farm for some reason or another, except there are dinos in this farm valley, and so you go about performing the usual tasks of cleaning the farm up, growing some crops and, in this case, taming some dinos to use both to ride around on and to ask them to do some light farm tasks. There's also a story, also about dinoosaurs, and a little somewhat open world with metroidvania-ish sections where you need a certain dino to progress.
This is the fun part. Cleaning up your farm, looking out for better dinos that could perhaps help take out that obstacle in your path and growing a few vegetables is all well and good. You ride your friend Lucky around, then you recruit whatever the spitting dino is called to help with farm watering (though it's still manual even though you ride the water dino) and then another few dinos that can break fallen logs, rocks and bushes respectively and you spend some 20-30 hours just cleaning up the farm, building pens and little sleeping tents as well as feeding troughs for your dino friends while also running back and forth between the hub city and your farm to tend to and sell your crops.
However, as the game grows and two more areas are added, it starts to become clear that this is really all you do and I also started to realize just how much work the developers want us to put in with just a few mechanics. Have to do hundreds of daily requests in order to raise friendship levels to unlock this thing or that thing, have to grow thousands of carrots and potatoes to master all dishes. Once you've explored every area and used the dinos to open up the "secret" paths to find even more dinos and resources, the sense of discovery disappears and the only thing left is tedious slog. Wake up, ride to town to complete the same tasks as every day, water plants that feel like they take forever to grow, repeat, and there's so much more of that game left once you finish the exploration and the majority of the main quest. Even on a fast dino, there's too much riding in a straight line for too long to get to the next area only to drop off a thing for like 10 seconds and then ride back.
There's also a major problem with the dinos, in that they can level up and they do so by performing the task they're meant to complete, so the triceratops and its related species levels up by smashing rocks. The problem is that rocks, logs and bushes are finite and only very few of them respawn, meaning that you can't reasonably level more than one dino per type and you probably really shouldn't sell your wood and rock, like I did, since you can't get a steady stream of new ones. Dinos do level up from walking and it's nice that this makes it benificial to bring a whole little troupe when you go exploring, but it's slow going and the true leveling comes from performing their tasks, which ultimately means you can't really partake in the Pokemon-like system where you're meant to constantly hunt for dinos and wanting to replace common ones with ultra rare ones, because the ultra rare one will restart at level 1 and level 1 stamina is so low they're nearly useless. This is a bigger problem than I think even I realize, as it really
All that complaining aside, this is a good game that is fun at first for some 20 hours, then becomes a chore and I'm always disappointed when a game is too boring to finish as I'm a completionist that always wants to finish everything, but this one isn't getting finished. There was some fun recruiting the first few dinos and clearing up the farm, and this is a finely made game that is a cut or two above a lot of these lesser-known cozy games, but it just far overstays its welcome while offering too few tasks and I won't be sticking around to complete everything.
The game is your typical Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon inspired game where you inherit a farm for some reason or another, except there are dinos in this farm valley, and so you go about performing the usual tasks of cleaning the farm up, growing some crops and, in this case, taming some dinos to use both to ride around on and to ask them to do some light farm tasks. There's also a story, also about dinoosaurs, and a little somewhat open world with metroidvania-ish sections where you need a certain dino to progress.
This is the fun part. Cleaning up your farm, looking out for better dinos that could perhaps help take out that obstacle in your path and growing a few vegetables is all well and good. You ride your friend Lucky around, then you recruit whatever the spitting dino is called to help with farm watering (though it's still manual even though you ride the water dino) and then another few dinos that can break fallen logs, rocks and bushes respectively and you spend some 20-30 hours just cleaning up the farm, building pens and little sleeping tents as well as feeding troughs for your dino friends while also running back and forth between the hub city and your farm to tend to and sell your crops.
However, as the game grows and two more areas are added, it starts to become clear that this is really all you do and I also started to realize just how much work the developers want us to put in with just a few mechanics. Have to do hundreds of daily requests in order to raise friendship levels to unlock this thing or that thing, have to grow thousands of carrots and potatoes to master all dishes. Once you've explored every area and used the dinos to open up the "secret" paths to find even more dinos and resources, the sense of discovery disappears and the only thing left is tedious slog. Wake up, ride to town to complete the same tasks as every day, water plants that feel like they take forever to grow, repeat, and there's so much more of that game left once you finish the exploration and the majority of the main quest. Even on a fast dino, there's too much riding in a straight line for too long to get to the next area only to drop off a thing for like 10 seconds and then ride back.
There's also a major problem with the dinos, in that they can level up and they do so by performing the task they're meant to complete, so the triceratops and its related species levels up by smashing rocks. The problem is that rocks, logs and bushes are finite and only very few of them respawn, meaning that you can't reasonably level more than one dino per type and you probably really shouldn't sell your wood and rock, like I did, since you can't get a steady stream of new ones. Dinos do level up from walking and it's nice that this makes it benificial to bring a whole little troupe when you go exploring, but it's slow going and the true leveling comes from performing their tasks, which ultimately means you can't really partake in the Pokemon-like system where you're meant to constantly hunt for dinos and wanting to replace common ones with ultra rare ones, because the ultra rare one will restart at level 1 and level 1 stamina is so low they're nearly useless. This is a bigger problem than I think even I realize, as it really
All that complaining aside, this is a good game that is fun at first for some 20 hours, then becomes a chore and I'm always disappointed when a game is too boring to finish as I'm a completionist that always wants to finish everything, but this one isn't getting finished. There was some fun recruiting the first few dinos and clearing up the farm, and this is a finely made game that is a cut or two above a lot of these lesser-known cozy games, but it just far overstays its welcome while offering too few tasks and I won't be sticking around to complete everything.