This game is baffling after the huge step up Trio of Towns was over the laggy, annoying design decision-riddled mess SoS. And no matter how cumbersome SoS was, the characters still had depth in that and the game mechanics still functioned. Pioneers of Olive Town is the worst of all worlds: everything is a cardboard cut out, runs like garbage on switch, and it is not a farming game at all.

You will spend most of your time parked next to some kind of crafting machine to feed it materials because you can only craft things one at a time. Farming has been so nerfed, there are no longer festivals/competitions for it or livestock. All your crops will basically go toward tediously crafting thing upon thing and I'm not entirely sure to what end.

There are no characters in this game. They're all soulless robots who just happen to occupy the space outside your farm. Night and day difference from the wholly pleasant and memorable cast of ToT.

Between this and RF5, I guess I'm just going to have to replay RF4 and ToT until I die.

"Chernobog" is an awfully strange way to spell "RNGesus." It's baffling that this game is tagged "choices matter" on steam because your choices do not matter. The game actively punishes you when you don't follow its rigid (and incredibly hollow) structure, then punishes you some more when you do. The lovecraftian setting is funny when you realise attempting a successful playthrough is the definition of insanity; doing the same thing each time, hoping the rolls go your way and it's somehow different now.

Though the Sunken Sins DLC adds a level of visual polish to the game, the mechanics are just as bare. There are a handful of event chain quests that you will likely never see through to the end because you're still forced to pick whatever result is most advantageous to keeping your stats above water, killing the chain's progression. And perhaps it doesn't matter since you probably won't make it past the first year. And if you do, you'll find your "choices" dwindling further, with less people to sacrifice either because they're dead now or they're quarantined with the plague, less people to proc letter events, all traits likely known to you so there's nothing left to discover. Seasons become worse than routine, they now waste your time as those very nice result screen animations can't be skipped and are now very annoying.

I got this game on sale and still think I paid too much. This game really doesn't want you to play it, so don't.

One man's "tantric" is another man's "blue balls."

I don't care much for pirates, I like to steal and murder with my feet planted on solid ground, so it's a testament to this cyoa that I plopped money on the table after the demo. But this thing is like a Twinkie. The first bite is delicious but after that you realise it's simply hollow and sickeningly saccharine and not something you wanted after all.

I was willing to overlook the blandness of the love interests and their baffling contextless attraction to the protagonist. The writing seems to love them but never gives you any reason to. I found your first captain, your first love in Boston, even the man who attempts a coup to be more interesting and worthwhile. Consent is great but it's also fetishised to a hilarious, unpiratelike degree which took me right out of everything and only served to fatigue me. This unending "mother, may I" strangeness is further compounded when you reach scenes where your choices are all out of character and unideal. At one point you collapse and are princess carried away for treatment, which is absolutely fine and normal, but your only choices are being incredibly rude, ungrateful, stubborn or flirty about it. My health is on the line and I have a bunch of people who rely on me, the devil himself could be carrying me, I don't care.

The story chugs toward a final battle and depending on your choices, it feels inevitable. I was preparing myself for most of the story to go out in a blaze of glory, for brotherhood and freedom. I was willing to see my character, her crew, her love interest, and everyone die. So when I finally get to the destination and someone says rather uncharacteristically "this is impossible" then I'm immediately whisked to another page that tells me I just gave up without even trying and lived a comfy life, the end, I'm sorry, no. Perhaps there are a series of choices I could have picked that would unlock that final battle but given the swiftness of the end, I doubt the author invested the time writing up a satisfying siege scenario.

There is a terseness to the writing that I don't personally mind but looking at it as a whole, the entire thing feels like a first draft. Locations and actions will suddenly change, with your brain feeling confused as it expected a few more scenes in between. Everything in the final chapters feels incredibly rushed. The bones are kinda there, there's just no meat.

All of these shortcomings would be tolerable, I guess, if we didn't live in a world where several erotic pirate games exist, ones where you are quite convincingly a pirate who does pirate things, where the romance feels well formed, and where your choices don't suddenly stop mattering. I guess I wanted a raspberry Zinger instead.

A few steam reviews make mention of humor and dialog but there's not much in this game. There's actually only enough story to get you going then the game steps back and lets you do your thing undisturbed. The dialog that does exist is pleasant enough and while a few lines of lore are scattered across some bookshelves, I didn't feel I needed more story than what was given. If you're expecting some sprawling saga, a speaking protagonist, memorable characters, or love exposition, you won't get that here.

The game captures the zenlike repetition of something like Monster Hunter where you repeatedly hurl yourself at the same boss which is an advertised feature but everyone is given very few tools to do this. The combat is extremely streamlined. Your attacks can't miss, the boss can't miss, you won't be juggling tons of skills and learning roshambo buffs and debuffs. And unlike Monster Hunter, you will find yourself trekking back to town to change class after fights. The developer provides teleportation between the front of dungeons and the bosses (thank you), but you will still spend a dozen or so seconds doing a meditative walk back and forth.

The developer was responsible by putting a warning at the start of the game but there is a great deal of screen flashing during combat. It's not necessarily any more than can be found in your average RPGM game and definitely not gratuitous or deliberately harmful but because all the battles take place in a black void, it's can be fatiguing on the eyes. I found myself blasting my room lights and wearing computer glasses to get through some of my loot farming runs where every single attack was flashing the screen.

You get to sail a boat around. :)))

This game is an excellent "two obnoxious people on a date" simulator. I think you're meant to find Mel endearing for whatever reason but they just came off to me as an inappropriate wind-up merchant at best, actively antagonistic at worst. Completely unsympathetic in their first impression. The protagonist isn't any better. They come off as desperate, creepy, and somewhat selfish even within passages where you have no choice, which seems to be handwaved as simply "everyone is like this." You're given a lot of choices but none of them gelled with me. It was like picking between jumping into acid or jumping into lava every single time. I couldn't make it past dinner as result. I have to assume whatever arc these characters have aren't really arcs at all, but just commentary on how messed up this world is as a means to lazily absolve their garbage personalities, but I'll never know.

I liked the art and the setting. I was wholly accepting of this dystopian melonpeople storm world within the first few lines. It's simply the characterisation and choices that made it unplayable for me.