Recent reviews by HFEpro

cats and sandwich stacking!!! reminds me of the lilo & stitch sandwich stacking game i used to play on the disney channel website back in the day. doable achievements as long as your own irl cats don't hog the screen lol.

lovely art style and character design. difficult but doable (except the kill six enemies during one turn for a later unlock, although other people have managed to get it). lots of mechanics so every playthru doesn't feel same-y.

very lovely gardening game. lots of pots to use, a bunch of plants, and plenty of furniture to unlock.

i don't recommend Garden In! for anyone who can only afford one game once in a while even though I personally enjoyed it. it's a do stuff for fifteen minutes when you wake up, then check everything again in the evening kind of game. but if you're getting this on sale or with a bunch of other games, then go for it.

i love my screaming amphibious babies.

an adorable, chunky robot gets tricked into opening a sushi bar in a small town. gives the game that quirky animal crossing feel. i LOVE yeti's character design.

the game claims it's best played on a controller, but i get by with WASD just fine. DESPERATELY needs key rebinding tho. took me a while to figure out how best to comfortably speed boost while still moving.

each day has two distinct phases: out-about-town and restaurant. during OAT: you pick up litter (to unlock a lovely looking butterfly roll), hunt down the daily present, talk to people, buy ingredients to upgrade your recipes, drool over all the cute furniture, and invite your friends over to the cafe.

why are kappa and yeti not available as friends to hang out with in the cafe??? you do all these rituals to summon them and they don't count as friends in a game literally called "Make Friends".

during the restaurant phase, you activate your conveyor belt to churn out sushi for your customers. this is not a cooking game, which i appreciate. managing customers and managing food? especially without any assistants / sous chefs / servers to speak of? no thank you! it IS a little weird that the sushi-making bot isn't actually making the sushi, but it cuts down on the chores i need to do, so i'm fine with that bit of story and gameplay segregation.

i'm bringing up all these nitpicks because i really like the game. if the devs end up reading this, i want to leave them a couple things to think about.

my first playthru, i threw in coins willy-nilly. then i decided to try and organize them by sets and i was having a horrible time. i couldn't figure out how to start a new game because the main menu options are "continue" and "load game". i stopped playing for a day because i was frustrated by how overwhelmingly disorganized i'd made it.

the next day, i clicked "load game" and lo and behold, i could finally make a new file. this time i only threw in coins from whatever set i was currently collecting. i'm having a much better time now. i've been going down the list, currently working on the market set.

gameplay-wise, it's a clicker / builder game. you click your visitors, and they give you coins that you can use to buy random items from the pot. there's lots of cute stuff to collect. in addition to plants and flowerpots, there's also atmospheric items and animal-attracting items. the visitors are all little conical triangles with a leaf on them (i keep thinking pikmen when i see them).

i'd love some rain sound effects for the rain-producing items but i'm satisfied with the sounds / music as is. some variation in the rainfall like in koi farm would be amazing.

now that i've optimized how i go about collecting things, i'm having a wonderful time.

cute art style. not enough gameplay for me. the plants just sit around (which to be fair is what plants do in real life). even on whatever the top fast forward speed is, everything takes too long to grow. but i'll check out whatever the devs do next. i'm sure it's a relaxing experience for a lot of people, just not for me unfortunately.

i thought this was just a roguelike with standard-albeit-good casino aesthetics. then my friend Anxiety Wolf showed me the weird / fun stuff and now i'm hooked.

gives you the barest minimum amount of instructions to technically qualify as a tutorial. when / if you finally figure out what to do, it becomes a satisfying loop of cataloguing books, plus whatever else lies within the library.

cozy occult atmosphere with lots of intriguing reading: from both dialogue and item text.

to say its directions are obtuse would be to imply it gives you any at all.

and ♥♥♥♥ anything that needs more than 6 nectar. it's easy to hit a wall because you only start with 3-4 attributes out of however many the game has. your starting skills will only give you a score of 2 for each attribute, max. what the game wants you to do is combine those skills with items from the library and assistants from around / outside the town to boost your total. but if experimentation doesn't come naturally to you, you're gonna be staring at the gorgeous game art for a while until you stumble upon what to do.

the learning curve is a developer-made barrier to entry into an otherwise lovely game. games should never be made to please everybody, and Weather Factory is free to make whatever experience they want. however, i'd be more enthusiastic about recommending the game if it just told me how to play it. you can even make a "hands off" option for the game's more independent players. or the standard skip tutorial option.

lovely game. just be prepared to look up a guide.

a nice little toy if you like build mode in Sims but get exhausted building an entire house. needs more objects / stuffed animals. stuff to sit on the desks and beds. a color palette in addition to the color picker would be helpful.

i don't recommend this to people who can only afford one game once in a while. and if you do get this, you really only need the pets DLC. skip the kitchen and bathroom ones.

limited in scope and aesthetics. the former isn't inherently a bad thing. it's better to be a tight, cohesive experience than a sprawling one. if you want to build streaming / office / bedrooms without getting overwhelmed by all of Sims 4's options (and DLC costs), this is the game for you.

as for the latter, lots of people (myself included) bemoan the lack of things to include in your rooms. especially people who have earthier tastes. what's particularly baffling is how few of the paintings have color. most of them are black and white nightmares. adorable nightmares, but nightmares nonetheless.