This game is ugly, runs like hot garbage, and is as wide as an ocean with the depth of a puddle. It’s not really a survival game, or a simulator, or an RPG, or a strategy game. Despite cannibals existing, good luck trying to eat people. The build tools are ultra simple and lack customisation. Economy and trade aren’t systems at all, there’s no market to tank or corner. Characters are one dimensional and story nonexistent, so you only get what you project onto the mostly empty world. The biggest strategic choice you’re presented with is where to build your base, if you choose to build one at all.

Yet I am still recommending it.

One day, I ran past multiple groups of slavers on my journey. They all ignored me, a fine specimen to be captured and sold as chattel. This offended me so I did what any rational human being would do: track down key figures in the slave trade and assassinate them, plunging the area into chaos and doing in less than a week what Tinfist has had lifetimes to accomplish yet was too cowardly to see through.

If I wanted, I could have knocked them out and left them for cannibals or hungry animals, or brought them back to a base to be imprisoned forever and used as practice dummies. These are all viable options. And the world reacts to these things more often than not, sometimes in small ways, other times large. With the death of a handful of nobles, I brought entire towns to ruin while famine swept through what little was left. Anti-slavers sang my name at the end of the day, not Tinfist’s, unaware a bruised ego had motivated me and I don’t really care about slavery at all.

This is a “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em game.” You’re given a few pieces of LEGO from disparate sets and locked in a room to figure out what you can do with them. You may become frustrated or bored, but once you come up with something, the game excels until you’ve reached the bottom of the container and have to come up with something else. If you don’t like the pieces you have, just use the modding tools it comes with to make your own. Difficulty or tedium can be easily solved in a few clicks.

Beep.

This may be the only game that adequately replicates the feel of pre-internet suburban summer vacations without any strange emotional baggage or suffocating irony attached to it. There is a certain level of jank to everything that isn't an arcade machine, expected from a lone dev using unity to create an open world. Normally this would be a detriment but it comes off as charmingly appropriate for a teen navigating the world on their own. Since everyone in town is a robot, it feels less embarrassing when you struggle to operate a shopping cart or get temporarily trapped in a dumpster because you really wanted a discarded bag of chips or fumble buying a ticket only to take the bus the wrong way.

Despite being early access, the game is chock full of content. My only complaint is that it feels incredibly lonely sometimes. The dev has stated plans for multiplayer in the future but if you have no friends nor enjoy interacting with strangers on the internet, that won't solve the melancholy problem. It's ultimately a rather minor thing however. Just play another round of skeeball to forget it.

I recommend this game but with a few asterisks.

If you are walking into this expecting a drawing system approximating even a below average oekaki applet, you are going to be disappointed. I had no difficulty with the game recognising my drawing tablet (wacom pth-660), but pressure sensitivity is kind of lacking and tools are not particularly responsive on use. I don’t think this will improve with updates nor do I honestly expect it to. You’d be better off using MS Paint.

There are a wide variety of tools to use but after buying everything, I found myself in a sort of Goldilocks situation where none of them were just right for what I wanted. The solution to this is obviously adapting to the limitations of the tools themselves, but some might find this jarring.

Income can be rather slow. The most you can price a piece to sell at max fame is 400 credits. This is shocking when your ungrateful sister, after selling the birthday painting you made her for 30,000 credits, nonchalantly states you surely can’t be hurting for money as you’re definitely selling them for at least 2k each, right??? I would if I could... There also seems to be a hard cap on VR gallery visitors per day? Basically at some point you will likely find yourself in a quantity over quality scenario to keep your head above water because tools, paint, and canvases cost money.

There is some periphery plot about human/robot/alien politics but I’m not trying to accidentally encourage genociding anyone in this relaxing painting game so I largely ignored the story emails. Participation is unnecessary to progress as a painter, however if you want some kind of story and don’t like this one, well, you’re just left with a room where you paint.

Despite the game being early access, the existing content is substantial enough that there’s really no reason to wait to get it if you want it.

"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.

This is one of those surprising things where if you can get past the initial hurdle of "this is a little silly" used as a springboard to get you going and understand that it is primarily a series of isolated vignettes, there's a lot to enjoy here. My listed playtime is low because I spent a great deal of time with the public beta that used to exist elsewhere. The game benefits being played multiple times and in different ways as you only ever have enough time for so many things in a single playthrough and some encounters are locked behind checks.

There's a marked difference between mortal and immortal love interests. Mortal love interests last only a few pages which would normally be a downside but it works within the story and they are by no means ineffective due to their length. The sculptor stands out to me as I believe it's only something like five passages but by the end, I was inconsolable, rather a feat for someone I had no real interest in when I stumbled upon him. I was widowed many times and felt melancholy every single time.

Immortal love interests on the other hand are more involved. You can quickly lose a large chunk of in-game time to them. Some of them regularly offer you "outs" to abandon them and return to the main plot. While I found myself interested in all of them and their lives, I didn't find them particularly romantic. Where mortal ones are the entirety of a honeymoon condensed, immortals are the comfortable tolerance of a long married couple. You do get to have sex with a dragon in midair so that's something at least.

As for the main plot, it is what it is. Quite often I don't care much for saving the world and become resentful when I've no choice, but you have a choice in this. You can embrace oblivion if you want, and sometimes I did, because I felt sad a character passed away or misanthropic after a one night stand encounter. The game doesn't judge you for this. If you choose to fight, it's possible to balance both training and romance though it's easier avoiding the problems of immortals.

An otherwise interesting meditation on futility and the parts people leave behind if you'd only let them.

This is a niche recommendation. Desolation Tycoon is the perfect game for anyone prone to moods where they want to play something, but everything feels like too much effort. There are no stressful timers, important decisions, anything to keep track of, and nothing you do matters. Watching your little colored peg bounce across the landscape is quite soothing. Traveling between equally featureless towns is a kind of honest monotony you’d find living on the road.

What is this game’s power is also its weakness. What you see is what you get. There is no strategy or depth here. Character creation is random yet doesn’t change the flavor of your playthrough at all. It makes some things harder, others easier, but you’ll be doing the same thing no matter what. Unlocks change nothing either and is likely why this game features one of the harshest unlock treadmills I’ve ever seen outside of an abusive F2P game. It’s harsh because it doesn’t matter. They’re a trivial bonus, not a feature. Once you unlock something, you’ll likely never see it in the game as it gets added to the big bag of stuff the game blindly shoves its hand into. This is besides the fact you’re offered five possible unlocks at a time, yet may only choose three, with no ability to change your mind later. Getting to this point will have cost you a dozen real life hours at the mercy of random chance, too.

Futile repetitiveness can be appealing to some people, myself one of them. I like this game a lot. But if you’re looking for effective rewards for progress, emergent gameplay, or options to flavor a gameplay loop, you won’t find them here.

I don't think I've ever played/read IF that has been in such a rush to be over. You're at your job for less than 24 hours, hardly unpacked, barely two chapters in, and the narrative treats it as if you've been there for six months. You never get to know any of the romance interests because there is nothing to know. Their sole qualities are whatever is required to keep the plot moving, same as the absurd "dates." The idea of romancing a demon dad sounds great but you never get to see him be a dad or even really a demon for that matter. Sure, "blonde", "twee", or "wears a suit" can be significant traits when there's nothing else behind it. It's all so toothless and bland.

Aside from how unromantic it is, the protagonist is a little too "well defined" for my tastes. They spend most of the first chapter going on about how spooky this house is simply because it's run down or how their employer wrote a letter, like normal people don't live in dilapidated houses or some people just can't afford nor know how to email others. Surprised they didn't remark about how we need to close down libraries while they were at it. Choices are rather pigeonholed into stat archetypes which would be fine if any of them were reasonable but most result in or stem from the protagonist acting very stupid against your will. Despite generally being chaotic when I play games, I found my character clocked at a perpetual neutral because I tried my best to navigate around the most egregiously nonsense options.

The short length means it's over before you know it, so at least it doesn't drag. 🤷‍♀️

I didn't play through the entirety of Act 1. I found it impossible. This person you are trapped in a room with is just the worst person in the world. When the shadow monster showed up, I got a little excited, hoped I could leave with them because anything would be better than this albino prick. Ilar puts their hands on you, they insult you, they're rude, manipulative, and cruel, and how does your character respond? Endless apologies for THEIR behavior. When the VN telegraphs clearly that you're just supposed to be okay with this because hey, look at these cutesy letters and see, they have it so t-u-f-f, that is when I stopped. I couldn't take it anymore. If I could have, I would have shoved them into the rift and called it a day. Let them be someone else's problem as I disintegrate into the sweet embrace of nothing, finally free of them.

The world is well formed and established quickly though I didn't care a lick about it, maybe because it was Ilar who was explaining it. The overall presentation is nice though I feel Ilar has one sprite that doesn't look quite as good as the others, 3/4th angle/turn iirc. They maybe go a little overboard with the effects and I think some sounds managed to ignore my settings and play despite everything being muted.

If you enjoy being powerless and mistreated or trapped with a sociopath, I guess you can't go wrong with the entry price of free.

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.

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.