Recent reviews by Knyffen

This game is absolutely lovely. Very cute artstyle, nice music, lovely atmosphere, decent gameplay. But it is missing one thing - variety.

The gameplay mechanics have a very solid foundation, but once you've played a while you notice exactly how repetitive it is.

TLDR: The following is a rant of how the game is repetitive and wastes your time.

The main culprit is the "requests" system. Every in game day you are given various requests that you can do to level up your town. The requests are: kill X of monster Y; use resource X in area Y to repair a thing; do a puzzle to fix a thing; move a box from one area to another; donate X of resource Y in a donation box.
This might be fine until you realize that there are only a few monster types and all since all the tasks and puzzles are hand crafted, you are doing the same few tasks and puzzles over and over. Every time you have to fix a specific thing, it has the exact same puzzle. Every time you have to collect a specific resource in the 3rd town, you have to enter the dungeon and do the same puzzles every time in order to get to where you can collect the resource. Every time you need to move a box, it has to be moved along the same route every time.

Initially, I had fun doing these tasks and didn't mind how repetitive they were. This was because I knew that there were multiple areas in the game and expected some variety as I progressed. But sadly once I got tired of the first town I has already seen most of what there was to the requests system.

At that point I decided to skip the requests and focus on the main story (which was only possible since I could do all the dungeons on the first try - other reviews mention dying in the dungeons, and they would have to do the requests to gain upgrades). But then the game starts introducing arbitrary limits. Sometimes you _have_ to progress the town to a certain level. Sometimes the story involves talking to a person and then waiting until the next day. And at one point you need to use a specific resource to progress - a plant that requires four days to grow.

This brings us to the time speedup mechanic: The bench! If you have had enough of the tasks and want time to progress faster, you can sit and wait on a bench. You cannot sleep until night time, and by sitting on a bench you speed up the time. This however clashes with how the game splits the day into five parts (morning, midday, etc.)and only progresses to the next part once you move to a different area. This means that to skip a day, you need to wake up, walk to a bench, sit on it and wait, walk to another area, walk back to the bench, walk to another area, walk back to the bench, walk home and sleep. And when you are far in the game and simply want to finish it, being forced to wait four days for a plant to grow quickly becomes annoying.

So yeah. It is a great game, but it feels like they spent too much time on designing the areas and ran out of time when they needed to fill them with things to do. It therefore becomes a 10-20 hour long game with enough gameplay variety for 5-10 hours.

Initially a very fun game, but over time it becomes apparent how shallow many parts of the game are - or rather only the very early game up to the first dungeon feels finished.

The combat is quite good, and the overworld explorations is nice. But then you start getting annoyed by the game copying the same puzzle rooms (and worse if you die to the boss in one of the hand-crafted dungeons, then you have to do the entire dungeon puzzle to try again, which can take 10-20 minutes), how all the items are basically useless except for acting as "keys" to getting to new areas, how much of the overworld feels half-done/pointless, how the overworld collectathon orbs are completely useless, and many other things.

Overall, it could have been a great game if it kept its scope small, but instead it starts feeling like its wasting your time halfway through.

An example is after you get the grappling hook, solve a block puzzle in a cave, and now need the grappling hook to get to the rewards chest. But no. Your grappling hook it too short, so you need to exit the cave, go complete a dungeon run, upgrade your grappling hook, and then return to the cave to pick up your puzzle reward.

Another example/rant is the second area. *SPOILER WARNING* After I got access to it, I went there and a NPC told me I needed the boots to go in one direction, so I went the other. After going through the entire area, I didn't find the boots, so I went back to the town where a NPC told me he needed a mushroom that I had just walked past... so I went back through the entire area again, and got the mushroom, after which I got the boots from the NPC. Now I could pass the boot-required area and got to a town... where I got a quest to go to find an area halfway back on the way to the special mushroom. After said quest I now got the tool needed to completely explore the swamp, so I could now go through the area again.

While the game is pretty and plays well, poor design decisions made it a very meh experience.

I recognize a lot of systems that I usually like, but somehow they have managed to copy the systems without the synergies that makes them great.