Charming and thoughtful (as well as thought-provoking) little game that unfortunately suffers as a game. The story, essentially about facing death, is strong and sad, and the gameplay starts out almost as strong, with so many things to build, upgrade, craft, cook or fish and so much running around testing recipies, cutting crops and building more farms, but towards the end and for the final few hours, it became apparent that there isn't really all that much to find out there and there isn't much of a reason to build a farm large enough to cover the largest ship, because there's nothing to really find, buy or upgrade. Every chest, that you finally get access to hours after spotting it and through ability upgrades, just has seeds you already have in it. the shops also only sell seeds and the secret powers you unlock at the very end, depending on in what order you do things, end up serving little to no purpose since there's no big final goal.

There is no end boss of platforming challenge, there is nothing cool to find in the world, there is no gold-tier seed to grow. The game just sort of ends. It's very pretty, has a sad story and is a lot of compelling fun for the first half, or maybe a little more, until you realize that it's all amounting to nothing on a gameplay level. The story ends up being nice and sweet and I won't spoil any of it, and the story is the focus of this game, but then there are so many mechanics, for a story game, that I ended up missing a few more to really take it all home. Should've had more mechanics and less story or vice versa, probably vice versa even though I would've liked that less.

Reviewed on Dec 31, 2020


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