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the unintended consequences of curiosity looks like a cute little puzzle/adventure that works both as a single player experience and co-op for up to 4 players. the problem is, it's so buggy it barely works as anything.

the game starts in a village where you live with your parents and apparently participate in unpaid child labor. you even have to make your own pickaxe, unheard of! at least some rocks drop gold and such, probably to be used later on something, but I didn't get that far. while hacking away at stones, you find a cave and accidentally freeze the entire population by breaking the snow globe inside, which in turn becomes a ranged weapon somehow. so you gotta travel south and fetch the eternal torch from a magma- and monster-filled cave and set things right. it's a linear game but still somewhat open, with the possibility to explore multiple regions in any order to gather stuff needed to progress into closed off areas.

despite appearances, nothing on the way will be friendly. even fluffy bunnies are from monty python and they kill you if you touch them. they can be frozen for a few seconds and killed with the pickaxe and might even drop some meat, but also respawn relatively fast from their burrows, just like in real life. there are also mud monsters that take 3 freeze-pick attacks to deal with, and urinal-looking statues shooting mud (yeah, right). your own death means respawning at the entrance of the current area with a few seconds of invincibility, no other consequence from what I could tell, so it's just a minor annoyance.

controls aren't rebindable and there's no mouse support. if you're not using a controller (I wasn't), it's arrows to move around, space to pick up items and talk to people, q/w/e to use items in 3 different slots. sprinting would've been nice to save some time, but even though there are technically only 3 slots and only money stacks (and is stored separately), you can pick up a total of 8 items, then press tab and assign the hotkeys to something else, or press 'r' to drop them (unless it bugs out and breaks the game, as it did for me).

my biggest concern about the game was the boss fights mentioned on the store page. the first one wasn't too bad, the second more annoying until I figured out how it works, but the game broke and froze right after the fight when I wanted to drop something to pick up the quest item. after restarting the game, I was back right before the fight despite winning it already. did it again, tried to drop something, only to run into the same issue, so I stopped trying and uninstalled.

nice graphics, music on the repetitively side, but separate volume settings are useless because audio levels are all over the place. I set sfx level based on the clicking sound in the menu, only to be greeted with incredibly loud snoring as soon as the game started. lowered it and luckily I could barely hear the annoying gibberish during dialog (or pretty much anything else), but when I opened a chest or started breaking rocks, it was really loud still. also, no voiceovers, so the store page is lying about having full audio in 5 languages.

windowed mode, resolutions and languages are available, but there are typos and an ugly font for speech, and after re-entering an area, examined items and people reset as if they're yet to be interacted with. really annoying, hard to keep track and find out if they have anything new to say, though as far as I know they never do. enemies also tend to respawn, sometimes even rocks, but combat is mostly a non-issue.

there's no manual saving, nor any indication of autosaving, but I think it saves every time you enter a new area. numerous smaller glitches here and there as well, and the way respawns (don't really) work, you can have more items than you should, filling up your inventory, letting you skip entire areas because why go there if you already have what you need to progress? and as I found out, it can actually lead to gamebreaking bugs as a bonus.

overall, it's a buggy mess with not many redeeming qualities. mostly easy, not memorable in any way (except the bugs), probably more enjoyable with others, but that's true for most games, multiplayer or otherwise, and I simply can't recommend it in its current state. it should've been called the unintended but dealbreaking consequences of the lack of proper testing. stay very far away.

me and my friend love this game but it is impossible to play we keep having to restart because it is so glitchy .

Got this game so my three kids can all play together on one screen. They are having a great time and spend a lot of time laughing and having fun while playing it. It's a pretty simple game, but that is what I was looking for anyway.

It's a really cute game when it comes to the visuals and music. A lot of the puzzles are really interesting and fun to do and normally, we would be able to probably spend hours on this game.

However, one thing (actually multiple things) that need to be addressed severely are the many, many, many, many, MANY bugs within this game. The controls are confusing and you have to guess what button is which on your controller. It's difficult to just start a game because it glitches repeatedly when trying to choose characters. When player 2 would attempt to scroll to select their character, they either could not scroll, could not select and the game would simply back us out to the Start menu, and/or the game would glitch, showing a shadow behind the character and it was a roulette to know who they were playing as. But you HAVE to choose the character you used previously as the items will only appear for that one character, especially the critical ones.

Rimestone level, the hitboxes are random and wonky, the perspective is painful to navigate and when we got to the end, the exit never loaded, leading to us only running off of the map.

The Mud King took ten minutes longer than it should've because we repeatedly got stuck on the pipes and had absolutely no way of being free unless we were able to be killed by the mobs. Player 2 eventually was completely unable to enter the map in any direction and it was difficult to kill her so we could just start over.

The only saving grace from the glitchiness of this game is the many spawn points and saving areas because of how often we would die or restart the game (which becomes a whole hassle on top of the reason we had to restart, as seen above) and it takes far more time, needing more breaks to recuperate mentally from the hassle of all the brokenness of the game.

With that said, I cannot recommend the game at all until all of the many bugs have been addressed. I'm opening comments to let people to add more glitches and bugs I missed or forgot, so if you wish to make it easier for the developers to find them, I appreciate you adding your input.

Cute and charming, the game is a light puzzler.
My main issue is that the world feels very empty, the space between solutions to puzzles is far.
I don't need to be handheld but I also don't like having my time wasted.
Probably a bit pricey for what it is.
Wait for a sale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzXVhF9eQMA

Lovely little game made by one person. The soundtrack and the atmosphere were amazing and the puzzles, while not too difficult, were very fun and creative.

Tried to play but the default controls don't work with my keyboard layout and there seems to be no way to change them.

My Experience

Unfortunately, I picked this up prior to seeing Steam users come to a consensus on it. When my co-op partner and I finally tried to take it for a spin, only 54% of Steam reviewers were recommending the game.

While I liked the "South Park" style of character models and found the movement animation charming, we too (like many other reviewers) ran into a game-breaking bug. Early in the game, we ran into a door that required three keys to open. Whenever I (the first player) picked up a key, it went into my inventory and then could be used as normal. Whenever my co-op partner picked up a key, however, it turned into another copy of the ice spell that was currently in his inventory. The key disappeared from the map, and he was unable to use the key to open the door in question.

I could be mistaken, but it looked like there were only three keys in the areas of the game we had access to at the time, so we were effectively stuck. While I certainly respect the effort that must have been required to create such a game as a solo developer, I'd have to recommend against this one.

I mean. It's ok. Could be better.

Very fun game with a unique style, interesting puzzles and decent soundtracks, I just wish I have a friend to play with, that would be even more fun :) There are spaces for improvement, but you can see how much effort the developer put into little details, from falling leaves, flowers splashing as you walk by, and animation playing in sync with the music. All of these, done by one person. Kudos!