Recent reviews by Jacq

There's a lot to love in this game. Unfortunately, there's a point where the "smart" shipping breaks down and you either have to wait for an hour (or longer!) for goods to make their way to where they need to be on very silly ships, or wrestle with manual loading/unloading between islands and planets. As an example, ships that carry 90 items will often randomly start a long space voyage with 3 pieces of fruit, to a planet that needs stone.

This can be exacerbated by weirdness between the shipping and build priority AI. You will start to colonise a new island, only to have the ship unload its fuel or stone before its wood or tools, so your people can never build the most critical infrastructure (or warehouses). Your peeps often soft-lock because of things like this, unable to complete the hut or field they started building, but unable to change tasks, with your boats stuck at the port unable to unload because the port is full. The whole thing just ends up being unsatisfying and disappointing. I want to see what the game has to offer, but what I WANT is to build a bunch of colonies and feed space whales, not fight with AI shipping.

I started over a few times, trying to build "around" the bad AI -- Only building space ports on the same island I build libraries, carefully managing my import/export numbers (itself a HUGE chore for no apparent reason - why no "equalise across planets/islands option? Why can't I set every good on a planet to 1 number? Why can't I even see all the goods on a single menu until after I manually select each one? I could go on...) . But there's a point somewhere around the second planet and the electronics/chemicals tech where it always seems to break down. (There's also a point around the first scout boat / first autosave where my computer always completely locked-up and needed rebooting, 5-6 times altogether, but that might just be me.)

Genuinely, this is a good game with absolutely exhausting QOL and AI issues. I hope they patch it some day.

I wanted to like this game so much more than I did. The bones of it are good, the writing and voice acting is great, it's amazing. Mechanically, it's frustrating for no reason - it's buggy and prone to crashes, hitches, and stutters, and there are issues with icons disappearing (they show up on the map but don't exist in the world). There are also intentional decisions on the part of the devs that work directly against the player.

1. There's an impossible achievement. I get this, and even though I understand why people are mad about it, it makes sense how it fits into the game. (There's another impossible achievement, but this one is the result of a bug. This kind of undermines the intention of the first achievement.)
2. There are mechanics built into the game to show you progress, but they end up being meaningless: There is an "eye" that opens as you interact with characters to show your progress, but it's actually meaningless: One character's eye never opens, some characters "remember" how far open their eye is in between meetings, others don't, and most of them will progress their story after a set number of interactions even if you don't finish opening their eye.
3. If you're not very familiar with American geography (e.g. what cities are in which states and where each state is in the country) parts of the game are WAY more frustrating than they need to be.

I really enjoyed this game for the first ~10 hours. After that, it was a nightmare slog of crawling across an empty map at a glacial pace, trying to find invisible/nonexistent things to interact with. The ending doesn't really telegraph to you that it's the ending (it give every impression of being a "bad" or "incomplete" one), so it ends up being super unsatisfying.

I'm giving this a "recommend" because I think you should play it. If the stories seem interesting, and you like the kind of aesthetic its going for, and you're interested in little mini bits of speculative historical fiction, then play it. Just stop the moment it starts getting a bit boring. If you don't, you risk being like me, and having the water taste like bitter cooking wine.

I got in on sale for a song, so I can overlook how the story is nonsense and the levels aren't always balanced. It's definitely worth a few hours of your time if you like games like Dicey Dungeons or Dice and Slice (though I think this game has much less content and doesn't feel nearly as satisfying when you do succeed). I really can't emphasise enough how nonsensical the story is, though. Maybe there's something lost in translation, but it kind of feels like when a small child is telling you about a movie they watched six months ago.

It's fine. I fell for the launch hype comparing the combat to Hades and Binding of Isaac, and comparing the management aspects to Animal Crossing or Frostpunk. It's way more shallow than any of those games, and if you're expecting that kind of fun/depth/replayability, you'll be disappointed. It's an easy, fun, casual roguelite, but don't expect too much from it.

This is a pretty fun game if you focus on the story! The card mechanics aren't really anything to write home about, but they're interesting enough to keep you from getting bored. The translation is a little rough in places, but I think that ads to the charm. I learned a lot about the darker aspects of historical Russian mythos/religion.

It's fine! I saw pretty much everything there was to see after about 3 hours, but it took me 6 to beat it because it makes you start over sometimes by throwing a bunch of high level monsters at you every few days that will wipe you out. The progression is linear, except for a "Travelling cart" that randomly lets you skip huge parts of the game by spawning rare cards. Worth a few bucks and a few hours of your time.

This game is fantastic. I can't add much to what others have said, but it's a really soothing mix of theme and mechanics. I stopped playing in Early Access (after about 20 hours) when I learned they would reset progress for full release, and I'm so glad I did. Lots of people don't seem to like that story, but I think it's a really interesting take on the kind of Greast Depression 20/30s-era Americana of mining towns and company scrip. Even if you don't care about the story, the gameplay's great and there's so many nice little touches. My favourite game of 2022 so far.

It's fun, and not as challenging as it first seems. I played through and I'm sure I missed a lot of easter eggs.

Cute and fun little story. The sokobon puzzles were too hard for me lol, but you can skip them if you want (I did.)

I played this game through to completion years ago and enjoyed it. I'm replaying it now with the ultimate edition upgrade and it's just as fun as I remember! The silly narrator and his rhyming couplets are awesome. There's a fair amount of RNG so don't get too attached to any character. The new difficulty modifiers are nice and not game breaking: The one that gets rid of the gold cap allows you to progress a little faster, the extra heart mitigates that early-dungeon RNG a bit.