A very fun and cute game. Gave some good spore-vibes but played very differently. Invites heavily for tinkering with combinations and parts, sadly makes combining a grindy chore that's also nastily random.
Does not only reward exploration but demands it.
Very rewarding in evolving from a tiny helpless lil snot to whatever apex-predator you want to become. So gradually and granular, very little games offer.
It is VERY clunky though, but had no real issues or crashes.
Totally worth the asking price despite the downsides. It's a unique pearl where I really hope for a sequel!

Good:
- Creative and fun gameplay
- Cute graphics
- Excellent loading-times
- No wasted time when dying. 1-2 seconds and you're at it again.
- Nice humor sprinkled in

Bad:
- Clunky, could have used a good while longer in QC/Playtesting (but nothing gamebreaking)
- Positioning/locking onto enemies is abymsal, i heavily relied on AoE-damage just to reliably hit enemies around me
- You can become so good in e.g. mobility, that devs didn't think of how high you can fly, so it's easy to reach map boundaries you shouldn't have reached.
- Incredibly annoying music that loops very tiny fragments forever. One of the few games i muted the music quickly. Which is a great bummer to me.
- Why the horrible random in combining? The ressource for it is already sparse. I had to cheat my part to go nuts in combining.

I've recently been playing through both Voidling Bound and this game, and although Strange Seed is not as graphically impressive, the game is a real gem. Truly.

I will go ahead and tell you, this is a pretty short game, but it also tracks your time in the background, which means if you're into speedrunning, this game has some replay value when it comes to that. Eventually you will hit the current end of the game, but I am hoping this developer keeps adding more to the game like the ocean expansion we just got.

But despite its brevity and small scale, this game has a ton of charm to it. You get to build extremely goofy-looking critters and run around in locations which might remind you of maps from an N64 game, building your critter up to the point of being able to do ridiculous things by killing and digesting the parts of other critters, and overall the game is incredibly rompy and very enjoyable.

Bosses present reasonable challenges, but you can overcome them either by skill or by upgrading your creatures, and later on you get access to fusing parts together to combine stats. However, the game does not let you merge two body parts that grant skills, so you've got to make choices about what kinds of skills you want your critters to maintain.

Despite having a pretty limited number of statistics you've got to keep track of, the game has a surprising amount of depth to the way things like Jump / Weight / Speed / Stamina affect things, and it's very fun to optimize your critters for what you need somewhat on-the-fly.

Combat is simple but requires careful attention paid to timing and directional facings, but after a little bit of practice you'll get the hang of it. And in some cases, it can almost feel turn-based. There's also a fair amount of stuff done through menus, and while a lot of people compare this game to Spore, it really has its genesis in a game like EVO: The Search for Eden for SNES.

I actually like this game so much I wrote a guide for it, and if you're into collect-a-thon style platformers with music that feels very close to Banjo-Kazooie's instrument set, you're gonna have a great time. If you're thinking of snubbing this title in favor of a better-looking one, know that you are overlooking a fantastic game. Like I said, I'm playing another AAA-style game made with Unreal that's a creature collector, and this game still holds up against that.