This is genuinely one of the better throwbacks to the genre I've played in years. I really enjoy how it feels less like a PS1 game and more like a classic DOS/Win 3.1 game like Ecstatica or LittleBigAdventure. It's such a peculiar styling that it genuinely got me more into the atmosphere than if it were just wiggly polygons on wonky vertexes and overloaded dithering.

Control is top notch as well, not a missed note in terms of giving the player enough options to maneuver in combat (and avoid it entirely if you want). Only real thing I have is I'm not huge on the waving of the aim reticle when doing more precise aiming, but that's moreso a me thing if anything.

Really my one big misgiving with recent Survival Horror titles often being too heavy on the Key-Door-Switch puzzles, especially when it feels like it goes against the world the puzzles are in. This one definitely had moments where I had to grab a guide and it kinda sucked me out with some of the longer tasks.

Thankfully the game is short, about 5 and a half hours in a single sitting for what I played and it's still very much well worth your time if you're hankering for a throwback survival horror game that actually makes an attempt to do it well.

If people tell you this game is relaxing, it's likely because they're experiencing a collective hallucination.
This game is NOT relaxing.

The moment you step outside of your house you are overwhelmed by an endless list of tasks to do like watering crops, feeding animals, chopping trees, mining rocks and shit like that. If you just thought "that's standard farm-life-sim stuff", well, think again, cause you're supposed to tackle all of that within a day cycle that goes by really fast and on top of it you have to be mindful of every decision you take, cause pretty much every action depletes the energy bar.

Now picture this: you want to gift a jar of mayonnaise to your favorite villager (everyone in this game loves mayonnaise for some reason) but the fucker is nowhere to be seen, so you wander around for several minutes in vain and the next thing you know, half the day is gone and you've accomplished nothing.
Man, did I enjoy Stardew Valley!

it's a fun little cozy city-building game that you can do to waste a few minutes. i wish there was more to the sandbox, and more to the high score mode... and also to the rest of it, it gets repetitive very quickly. the sounds are nice, the style is nice, but it really does feel like this would be way more suited for a mobile game or some sort of on-the-go kind of game rather than a sit-down game. still, there's a fun little mastery i think you could really get from it, and i will definitely come back to it whenever i feel like not sinking my time and stress into cities: skylines. plus, less than a gig!

left feeling very lukewarm about this. a really great premise that you can tell pulls off exactly what it wants almost flawlessly but gets bogged down by insufferable anime tropes and relies just a little too heavily on its use of unconventional storytelling to be unique to the point that in the end it just feels like a gimmick. maybe im just a hardass but mmmmmmsomething just felt missing for me. i have a lot of thoughts about this game. if i dont shut my mouth now i never will, but at the end i was just kind of sat there thinking "that was so fucking generic what the hell" and the post-credits only reinforced that feeling for me. maybe something is wrong with me. guys.

So the one I spent the most time with was New Leaf, and the one I played most recently before this was New Horizons, and as someone who argued that part of the reasons New Horizons was boring was because it was too easy/gentle/kind to the player, I can now much more confidently say that I was right.

I've only had my town for a few days now, but I think I'd say my perfect Animal Crossing game would be somewhere between this one and New Leaf. This one is missing a lot of quality of life upgrades that I was very used to with New Leaf (like donating more than one thing to the museum at a time for example) that I feel like don't really apply friction/an edge to the player in a way that's satisfying. Similarly, the pause in input between playing using stylus input and switching to buttons (or vice versa) is really annoying. I like playing my DS games using both stylus AND buttons, especially in a game like this, where overworld movement feels better with the D-pad but I despise using it as a cursor in full-screen menus. But there are other things about this game that give it a certain toughness to it that I feel like is lost in the more modern games.

The biggest example I can think of is the villagers, which I know is something people bring up a lot. In this game, the villager's personalities feel a lot more real. And because the player is just another person living there, there's this balance that you feel like you have to strike with the environment. It's not your community because you own it, it's your community because you live there.

I definitely see the appeal of the future games, especially NH with how much freedom you get. But I don't know, at a certain point, it just lost so much character and personality in exchange for giving the player more power over the map. Here though, I feel like I'm part of a living, breathing world that exists even when I'm not there. And I really need that.