As I installed this game, I thought I was only installing a simple little Zelda-like roguelite with a limited scope, so I was very happily surprised to find that there's much more to the game. Not only do you do roguelite runs in about half a dozen dungeons with your typical randomized floors and rooms, but you also have a predefined overworld riddled with secrets to explore, a (very simplistic) town building portion, basic farming and there are so many upgrade merchants that the game even lets you upgrade how quickly you can dig holes with your shovel. Making runs to gather resources and then spend said resources on building and improving an HQ of some kind is about as much my jam as a game can get, so I can already say that I really enjoyed this one even though it's also the most obviously abandoned and unfinished game I've played in many years, at least a decade.
The basics are just Zelda. You run around in a top-down view and swing your sword. There's also a stamina system that doesn't really add or detract much and is just kinda there. You're given a quest to do something or other to ward of some evil god or whatever, and are let loose in the open world to find and complete the first dungeon. The open world functions just like a Zelda would with free roaming that is blocked off by paths you need certain tools to access, while beating up slimes, digging up hidden treasure and collecting stuff for that one guy in town that wants rare rocks. Then you enter the dungeon, which tells you that you're not allowed to bring any of the upgrade gems with you into it, like Rogue Legacy, and then you explore three floors in order to make it to the boss while grinding up as many gems as you can find so you can upgrade everything from base damage to crit chance to stamina to, like I said, even how fast your shovel is, how bright your lantern shines and the blast radius of your bombs.
The game is clearly made with love and thought, because there are many little ideas and systems that elevate the whole experience, like how the dungeons just flat-out tell you when you've done everything in a room so that you don't waste time looking for secrets that aren't there, but it's also over-engineered in some areas and so obviously abandoned in others. There are just too many items to find and I don't see a reason for why we needed a second magic wand that's used like twice, instead of making that ability a spell for the wand you already have and have also only used like twice. I used the boomerang exactly once, to pick up a power thing that was hovering over a lava lake. There's like a dozen classes I never ended up using because they all seemed very samey and the game was over before I had even fully upgraded the starting class.
Strangest of all is that the world is just so littered with ideas that were obviously abandoned and never amounted to anything, like the statues that really look, graphically and geographically, like they're meant to do something but do not, or how about the dungeon entrance in the southwest that just never got a dungeon? Some reports on Reddit say you could enter it and find an empty room, but my game won't even let me enter the dungeon even though you can find a key for it. The endgame is bizarrely uninspired compared to the rest of the game and you can really feel how much the developers had just completely given up. The final dungeon added to the game, Fish Dungeon, is a woefully unfinished mess with one of the worst bosses I've ever seen. They didn't even come up with a name; it's just "Fish Dungeon" when the other themed dungeons got made-up fantasy names. The weirdest part is how the very final dungeon lets you fight the boss right off the bat, skipping the entire dungeon, and I didn't even notice that there was a dungeon the first time I beat the game. I went back because I spotted chests beyond the boss portal and I wanted to see what was there, only to find that there's a whole-ass dungeon that you don't even have to play because the game just gives up on itself and stops caring. There are also traces of a crafting system that never really happened, as every enemy can drop a resource that you can only use for a few potions that are unnecessary (I never brewed any but the health one), or sell them to a merchant. Farming never really amounts to anything either, primarily because they forgot that your planted crops need to drop seeds for the farming system to be any fun, but also because they can only be sold for gold that isn't really useful for anything in particular. It lets you open potion-brewing station in dungeons that you probably won't need since the game is quite easy, or buy furniture for your house that is limited in both scope and price. I finished with 2000 gold in my pocket and nothing to spend it on. I also finished with only half of the land plots in my town filled, as there are only so many shops (though there are quite a few) and the developers just gave up on adding more palette swap NPCs to fill the town out with, which seems to have been the idea. Instead you just build kind of a ghost town.
All of that said, I do have to say that I did not have a very glitchy experience like so many other reviewers did. The Fish Dungeon had really bad pathing and was annoying to play, one time I was riding the frog that lets you surf mud and the game kind of freaked out and threw me into an area I wasn't supposed to go to (but then recovered nicely by phasing me through trees I wasn't supposed to walk through and everything was fine; in fact, it ended up being a convenient shortcut) and the rock monsters in the infinite gem-grinding endgame dungeon clearly shouldn't be there as their spawn animation glitches them into walls all the time. I only made like five total runs in that dungeon and the rock monsters ruined two of those with their busted spawning. That's about it, though. I never had any gamebreaking issues, just disappointment issues regarding the sad state that this game was abandoned in. So close to the finish line yet so far.
There's about 75% of a fantastic game here. I absolutely love making resource runs in dungeons, coming out and building some new houses for my NPC residents, finding collectibles for them, tinkering with dozens upon dozens of various upgrades that I thought were fun and satisfying to acquire as you're allowed to be pretty strong, to the point where the final boss was joke easy with maxed stats, and maybe doing some light farming or fishing for variation, but the further I got through the game, the more it started to fall apart and become less and less fun, with the endgame being pretty dreadful and disappointing. I've seen games run out of budget before, and I've seen leftover pieces that never amounted to anything, but I've never seen a game scream so loudly that the developers just stopped caring, which in turn forces the player to stop caring as well. Makes you wonder if they ended up having a falling out and only ended up finishing their contractual obligations to Team17, or maybe Team17 was a pain to work with. Whatever the case may be, it's a real shame that a game that got off to such a strong start ended up being abandoned, ignored and unfinished.
The basics are just Zelda. You run around in a top-down view and swing your sword. There's also a stamina system that doesn't really add or detract much and is just kinda there. You're given a quest to do something or other to ward of some evil god or whatever, and are let loose in the open world to find and complete the first dungeon. The open world functions just like a Zelda would with free roaming that is blocked off by paths you need certain tools to access, while beating up slimes, digging up hidden treasure and collecting stuff for that one guy in town that wants rare rocks. Then you enter the dungeon, which tells you that you're not allowed to bring any of the upgrade gems with you into it, like Rogue Legacy, and then you explore three floors in order to make it to the boss while grinding up as many gems as you can find so you can upgrade everything from base damage to crit chance to stamina to, like I said, even how fast your shovel is, how bright your lantern shines and the blast radius of your bombs.
The game is clearly made with love and thought, because there are many little ideas and systems that elevate the whole experience, like how the dungeons just flat-out tell you when you've done everything in a room so that you don't waste time looking for secrets that aren't there, but it's also over-engineered in some areas and so obviously abandoned in others. There are just too many items to find and I don't see a reason for why we needed a second magic wand that's used like twice, instead of making that ability a spell for the wand you already have and have also only used like twice. I used the boomerang exactly once, to pick up a power thing that was hovering over a lava lake. There's like a dozen classes I never ended up using because they all seemed very samey and the game was over before I had even fully upgraded the starting class.
Strangest of all is that the world is just so littered with ideas that were obviously abandoned and never amounted to anything, like the statues that really look, graphically and geographically, like they're meant to do something but do not, or how about the dungeon entrance in the southwest that just never got a dungeon? Some reports on Reddit say you could enter it and find an empty room, but my game won't even let me enter the dungeon even though you can find a key for it. The endgame is bizarrely uninspired compared to the rest of the game and you can really feel how much the developers had just completely given up. The final dungeon added to the game, Fish Dungeon, is a woefully unfinished mess with one of the worst bosses I've ever seen. They didn't even come up with a name; it's just "Fish Dungeon" when the other themed dungeons got made-up fantasy names. The weirdest part is how the very final dungeon lets you fight the boss right off the bat, skipping the entire dungeon, and I didn't even notice that there was a dungeon the first time I beat the game. I went back because I spotted chests beyond the boss portal and I wanted to see what was there, only to find that there's a whole-ass dungeon that you don't even have to play because the game just gives up on itself and stops caring. There are also traces of a crafting system that never really happened, as every enemy can drop a resource that you can only use for a few potions that are unnecessary (I never brewed any but the health one), or sell them to a merchant. Farming never really amounts to anything either, primarily because they forgot that your planted crops need to drop seeds for the farming system to be any fun, but also because they can only be sold for gold that isn't really useful for anything in particular. It lets you open potion-brewing station in dungeons that you probably won't need since the game is quite easy, or buy furniture for your house that is limited in both scope and price. I finished with 2000 gold in my pocket and nothing to spend it on. I also finished with only half of the land plots in my town filled, as there are only so many shops (though there are quite a few) and the developers just gave up on adding more palette swap NPCs to fill the town out with, which seems to have been the idea. Instead you just build kind of a ghost town.
All of that said, I do have to say that I did not have a very glitchy experience like so many other reviewers did. The Fish Dungeon had really bad pathing and was annoying to play, one time I was riding the frog that lets you surf mud and the game kind of freaked out and threw me into an area I wasn't supposed to go to (but then recovered nicely by phasing me through trees I wasn't supposed to walk through and everything was fine; in fact, it ended up being a convenient shortcut) and the rock monsters in the infinite gem-grinding endgame dungeon clearly shouldn't be there as their spawn animation glitches them into walls all the time. I only made like five total runs in that dungeon and the rock monsters ruined two of those with their busted spawning. That's about it, though. I never had any gamebreaking issues, just disappointment issues regarding the sad state that this game was abandoned in. So close to the finish line yet so far.
There's about 75% of a fantastic game here. I absolutely love making resource runs in dungeons, coming out and building some new houses for my NPC residents, finding collectibles for them, tinkering with dozens upon dozens of various upgrades that I thought were fun and satisfying to acquire as you're allowed to be pretty strong, to the point where the final boss was joke easy with maxed stats, and maybe doing some light farming or fishing for variation, but the further I got through the game, the more it started to fall apart and become less and less fun, with the endgame being pretty dreadful and disappointing. I've seen games run out of budget before, and I've seen leftover pieces that never amounted to anything, but I've never seen a game scream so loudly that the developers just stopped caring, which in turn forces the player to stop caring as well. Makes you wonder if they ended up having a falling out and only ended up finishing their contractual obligations to Team17, or maybe Team17 was a pain to work with. Whatever the case may be, it's a real shame that a game that got off to such a strong start ended up being abandoned, ignored and unfinished.