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!

i liked the story but did not enjoy playing the game in the slightest

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 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.

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.

what if Forager had no rizz

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

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?

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.

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.