icepotato
2024
it's fine! hit a few of my particular likes (mining! twin stick shooters! incremental upgrades!), had a quaint little story, the upgrades weren't particularly grindy. if you think you would like this, you probably would.
2023
great opening that immediately establishes characters and setting without leaning on technobabble or infodumping. a neat little set of decisions that garner immediate feedback from your companions. and finally a perfect and achievable length. sure, the topics on AI responsibility and ethics got a bit of a sigh from me given current, but it didn't reach beyond its grasp and kept it centered on you and your companions.
2019
i really liked the alien planet setting. however i didn't like trying to navigate 3d space when setting up my production queues or the repeated force back to manual crafting even when I was trying to set up my automation. i'll probably come back to it later?
2021
A game that i should have connected with a bit better, because it has all the elements I like: great pixel art, top-down twin stick shooting, crafting, open world, flying, territory control, and even the story was pretty well told! but it just didn't land for me, and maybe it's because the elements were a bit fiddly (the classic "10,000 of your 15000 to get a 10% upgrade to one of sixteen stats" slog), or maybe its just because I'm not in the right place for it rn
2023
what if Forager had no rizz
2020
ok, at first i REALLY GROOVED with the tight minimalism of this game: no costs to lay down tracks, just pure focus on making efficient production lines.
Then it started to really invade my dreams, and then my waking thoughts. like, in a bad, intrusive way. I had to stop even though I really loved this game. It's good! it's great! it was too much Raw Stimulus for me and ended up being net negative for my life.
Then it started to really invade my dreams, and then my waking thoughts. like, in a bad, intrusive way. I had to stop even though I really loved this game. It's good! it's great! it was too much Raw Stimulus for me and ended up being net negative for my life.
i am looking for a good ecosystem game and while this game LOOKS like a good ecosystem game it's really a kind of opaque puzzle game where occasionally you place things to make numbers go up until you meet a hidden condition and win a prize. which is... fine, on its own, but not what i was looking for. and also a terrible title, jeez.
hot damn this is what it looks like when a crew knows their space and designs for it! i think this studio will go on to do great things and i will not look up what happened to them after they released this game!
i liked the story but did not enjoy playing the game in the slightest
2024
i actually liked hunting animals with a bow to make them work at my base, i thought it was very pretty, and the discourse was wildly disconnected from the actual experience of playing the game. it's a survival base building game. it's got some nice ways of getting you started and some smart decisions and it's got some wonky stuff. ok!
2024
it's so incredibly frustrating to see a game with a cool movement system and some interesting ideas around combos and counters just absolutely give up on encounter design and a difficulty curve because a roguelike is a common design pattern.
actually made it through this time, boy that capitol city is a b brick house of a first act! and really the entire game has a very strange structure. it's cool to see it adopt less traditional structures but by the time i wrapped my head around it, it was over (and i was ready for it to be over!) .
im sorry my rice saplings were spaced too far apart goddess i will do better next time (i did, and now i am learning about proper fertilizer mixtures and timing)
tapped out after getting through the first village because i saw my entire life laid out in front of me in a series of gray fogs dissipating.
it's fine, its technically a very good "video game", you press x and he swings a sword to a delightful combat whatever whatever whatever. its just i got my spotify wrapped from the past year and i felt like i spent it in an algorithmic tar pit, listening to whatever came up next, not acting with intention about what i put in front of my eyes and ears. and like: cool man, i survived last year, presumably you did too, congrats all around, etc etc etc. but like when i was going through the prologue of this game i swear to god i heard each of the committee voices speaking in the design room. when i got to the Mandatory Loosely Historical Minigames section I just... I mean, i could move on, but why? this isn't even assassin's creed. this CAREFULLY GENDER-NEUTRAL BUT DEFINITELY SEXED (UNLESS???) protagonist doesn't have the charm of ezio. this isn't cloak and dagger medieval italy or Crusades Jerusalem. This is the netflix show i watched in a haze while feeding newborns for six weeks at 3am (The Last Kingdom, not the other two netflix exclusive viking shows). I'm not scouting out a unique assassination location, i'm running into guys and pressing X a bunch because stealth attacks dont work until you get to a higher level and spend your skill points(???) just like every other video game about vikings that exists. Oooh i hope it has a rune system for my upgradeable equipment! (it does).
if you want to spend 60 hours playing a videogame this is definitely one you can do that in. no problem.
it's fine, its technically a very good "video game", you press x and he swings a sword to a delightful combat whatever whatever whatever. its just i got my spotify wrapped from the past year and i felt like i spent it in an algorithmic tar pit, listening to whatever came up next, not acting with intention about what i put in front of my eyes and ears. and like: cool man, i survived last year, presumably you did too, congrats all around, etc etc etc. but like when i was going through the prologue of this game i swear to god i heard each of the committee voices speaking in the design room. when i got to the Mandatory Loosely Historical Minigames section I just... I mean, i could move on, but why? this isn't even assassin's creed. this CAREFULLY GENDER-NEUTRAL BUT DEFINITELY SEXED (UNLESS???) protagonist doesn't have the charm of ezio. this isn't cloak and dagger medieval italy or Crusades Jerusalem. This is the netflix show i watched in a haze while feeding newborns for six weeks at 3am (The Last Kingdom, not the other two netflix exclusive viking shows). I'm not scouting out a unique assassination location, i'm running into guys and pressing X a bunch because stealth attacks dont work until you get to a higher level and spend your skill points(???) just like every other video game about vikings that exists. Oooh i hope it has a rune system for my upgradeable equipment! (it does).
if you want to spend 60 hours playing a videogame this is definitely one you can do that in. no problem.
i played this game for two and a half hours and it was a nice little snack. it was fun to come from playing cobalt core first (a game with a lot more going on) and see the bones cleanly laid out here: great art, wonderful handle on character voice, nice crunchy mechanics with a ton of polish.