Game with a relatable story about going back to your hometown in adulthood and it REALLY sucks, not because anything's changed with the cute old map-shop couple living across the street, or the curry special at the local diner, but because you've had cinder blocks tied to your feet causing you to walk at a glacial pace, and your good old friend Fujita hasn't gotten into conspiracy theories or MLMs, but building space-time exporation devices he insists you to check 'the vibrations out'. He breaks you into a power plant, you meet aliens, and things get worse from there.

The game itself is mainly walking (slowly) around the surprisingly detailed and realistic-feeling town with your shitty car, the fastest bus system in the world, and trains. You can check e-mails to get a sense of who to meet or when, but sometimes these people want to meet you at nighttime and you can only pass time by walking around, or sitting on a couch (for one hour at a time: and up to two hours max.)

The minimal interactions and weirdly detailed spaces with their bespoke toilet rooms and random characters stick around in your mind afterwards. I think that's the game's strong suit - all you can really do is talk to or kill people, but that combined with your relative helplessness in combat make you even wary to walk around a hospital, since some characters will just assault you based on your in-game state.

Well, I didn't stick around for more than 3-4 hours to really see what could happen or pan out beyond a few in-game days, but it's a unique game. There IS technically a goal to do (pursuing the mystery of the game,) but it feels equally valid to just barely follow the plot and wander the huge city and enjoy the wonderfully-modeled spaces. It feels Crypt Underworld-like - the game doesn't really progress the story a lot of times outside of moments you really have to hunt for, so it kinda feels like walking in and out of bizarre, city-life vignettes.

(Reviewing the single player vanilla survival experience in 2023)

There's a certain charm to how difficult and fragile it is to progress when doing survival - you have to be so conservative with your runs and building beds/etc, trying to descend into caves is really fraught, it's so hard to find minerals, stuff is placed in the most awful places (iron on ceilings), combat is so broken and unbalanced, biomes seem to go on forever. Honestly the impression single player vanilla gives me is basically a tech demo with almost zero game design sense. It's interesting to think about the generations of games that built upon or were influenced by this game as a result. Dragon Quest Builders, Death Stranding...

Overall it's a little funny the single player survival mode even exists? Obviously the real draw with this game is the mods, the multiplayer. As a friend put it, the base game is like "rice". It sort of feels like Survival is there because "why not", but it's funny how the combat, movement, resource balance and map sizes feel like a broken (but charming) prototype in a lot of ways.

As a game designer playing this makes you think "this kind of survival sure is an interesting texture, I wonder how it would feel if it was some other way..."

Nevertheless it's still a super memorable game..4 stars it is!

Interesting deconstruction of the Harvest Moon genre - instead, the game focuses on a farm where it's hard to get by - where your town is nothing but a stopover for tourists and the rich on the way to the moon. Will you stay despite the routine and mundanity? Or leave everyone you meet behind for "The Moon?"

It's nice to see the few familiar faces also getting by, getting used to their rhythms, sometimes odd ones. I enjoyed the way some expanses of wilderness were just sitting next to your farm, full of some strange items that I never figured out the use for. Lovely art too!

Now to digress, generally speaking farming games make me wonder more about like - how do farmers live life and make meaning? Can a game express that...? The Harvest Moon format of farming games is obviously so stale and worn out... but I still think there's some kind of truth to life that the format of 'planting crops/gardening' could still convey. I like that this game tries to explore that format, even if I found the moment-to-moment kind of unengaging (even though that is of course, partially the point).

Farm work, I assume, is physically grueling. But is there something fun or satisfying in that? Something unique that establishes particular rhythms of life for farmers of different types around the world?

Beyond the typical HM-loop of watering my squares and selling the pixel vegetables for money every few days?

Review

I gave it a real shot, for 8 hours!

You can read my notes and thoughts here : https://twitter.com/han_tani2/status/1735187901296836666

Or read an essay in which I discuss TotK https://melodicambient.substack.com/p/why-ocarina-of-time-cant-be-recreated

The short version is: the game has its nice charming moments, I actually like the idea of janky physics dungeons and riding around on stuff. NPC designs are nice and some of the side quests looked interesting. But I hattteee the crafting stuff, it kind of ends up padding almost everything in the game out. There's also so much distraction, it feels like YouTube recommendations or TikTok...

Shitpost review

Zelda but if Miyamoto wasn't inspired by wandering the countryside as a kid but opening up Genshin enough times to get the 30 day login bonus

has an industrial harbor level but features zero intermodal containers. if you put meteor herd OR mad space in a 10/10 game, either would drag it down to a 7/10. the tails stages are like filing unemployment paperwork and the knuckles stages are like having dreams about your old department store job, which makes the sonic stages like the distant dying memories of your fondest ten minute smoke breaks. ive watched SOV basement gore movies with better audio mixing. anyway its pretty good. i like rouge the bat.

https://i.gyazo.com/76525f4af06a9a6194b6128055fe48d8.png

yeo's environmental design, soundtrack direction, and laissez-faire approach to 'structure' elevates the somber and dour proceedings here and the title's very much so animated by its refusal to guide the player in any strict sense. it's commendable how driven yeo is towards theme and feeling and the world has just enough in the way of flourishes to stimulate a sense of role-playing but too little to fully and succinctly become immersed in; yeo does well to play with this disconnect, causing the complete and utter listlessness of the game to swell and swell and continue to swell prior to the game's climax (if you could call it that) on a frigid november day

on the other hand...there's a dearth of particulars here for me to really feel invested in or compelled by. backtracking here: ringo ishikawa's ultimate success lies in a delicate marriage between the formal & aesthetic language of a kunio-kun game, and the - you'll have to forgive the reductive if undemanding comparison - exploratory, life-sim mechanics of something like shenmue. and the idea's so obvious, so axiomatic even in the kunio-kun games that ringo does little to iterate upon that idea, with certain environmental backgrounds and even mechanics feeling directly lifted from its NES progenitor. thrusting the lifesim framework to the forefront, then, is the most transformative quality of ringo and it achieves this by inviting players to test the boundaries of the world and create their own sense of meaning within that structure - that ringo obscures how tightly directed the game actually is only serves to further entrench just how well-considered and intelligent its design is as well. the game is also underscored by honest-to-god literary ambition which all eventually coalesces into an absolutely devastating ending but whatever i digress

point is, stone buddha...bit less going for it. it's a mood piece first and foremost - which, to its credit, its executes with total conviction and belief in the premise - but everything that you'd expect a game which probes into ennui would have is here, which honestly does it no favours. a lack of concrete narrative + good deal of economical prose invites some lovely interpretations, but you can see this specific ending coming a mile away and there's just too little that's actually transformative about it to really have the same sense of emotional resonance

sounds like im ragging but it's still a great time. unpolished sections and inelegant difficulty curve, sure, but it doesn't overstay its welcome and yeo's willingness to eschew conventional game design continues to delight. there's a lot to love about how the mechanics inform the atmosphere and how you eventually build an innate and instinctual feeling for exactly what you're supposed to do (and i particularly did enjoy how rote it felt when finally mastered - that contrast between what's supposed to be kinetic and improvisational versus the reality that you're a slowly advancing turret) but im also unconvinced that that part of the game was supposed to be intentionally monotonous like everyone says or whatever which does make me feel a bit of internal conflict. id bet my apartment on yeo designing the combat with a bottle of beluga going like 'yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa'. good for him