Recent reviews by Naburimannu

The game seems to check the boxes for a survival game - collection, mining, farming, processing, maintaining tools, solving puzzles, combining ingredients. It could be a pleasant little pastime if that's what you want. But after an hour it doesn't do anything to *sell itself as fun*. I'm going through the motions wondering why I'm doing this. There's a lack of professional polish on animations, controllers, kinetics, etc that doesn't provide a sense of weight or immersion - perfectly functional, definitely not as bad as some of the prototype games I've seen on Steam recently, but feeling amateur.

There's a bit of a language barrier, and the insistence on getting rid of as much UI as possible is a bit of an impediment - you don't have a copy of the books with you, so you have to go back to your library to review something, and flip through them with the slightly awkward controls. Things happen in game and there's no explanation of why. Some of the mechanics are rather obscure - not hard to use, but not at all obvious, you just stop getting an error message, and are left to guess what you might have done that caused things to work now. (I'm not talking about the minigame puzzles, all of which seem quite nicely done, but game mechanics like providing oil for the generator underneath the lighthouse.)

Like so many other games in this genre, it has the fundamentally user-hostile policy of only letting the player save at the end of the day, in bed, which has serious game / time / story effects. Plonk.

This game is also an interesting lesson in matching the game genre to studio skills. It comes across as fundamentally unpolished - there's a lot of art, but the styles don't match, the animations are rough, the controls are perhaps a bit rough... Things seem hurried and underexplained, and the writing could have used another round or three of editing. Cute idea! But it would have done much better with a smaller scope and less of an attempt at realism - it would be a strong contender with either a good 2d implementation or a more cartoony 3d (Portia / Sandrock style?)

Preliminary review - I do think I'll come back to this eventually. Story is intriguing, composition is good. The thumbsdown is purely on this question: 3.5 hours in, when I decide that it's a bit too fussy in "default" difficulty, do I look forward to starting over? Not today, DOLOS, not today.

20 hours in: Having played a lot of early city builders back in the day (Caesar 3?), I wonder if my dislike for his game - and perhaps the entire modern genre - here is the use of a single very long campaign with continuity, rather than a sequence of short scenarios. If something goes wrong, you're going to be living with that permanent penalty forever, and there are many, many surprise penalties in this game. Or maybe it's the capture of so many genres by hardcore players - on Easy ("journey") mode, consulting multiple guides, I'm still playing sufficiently "suboptimally" that I'm going slower than intended and getting the permanent penalties for time trials. Without spoilers it feels like this would be a fifty- or hundred-hour game because there'd be so many unavoidable errors and so much reloading.

Well done, but not to my taste.

As is sadly usual for the genre, my response to this game is predisposed to negative, because it only allows saving in bedtime at home at the end of the day, a remarkably user-hostile approach.

But I was playing Portia and enjoying it anyway; days are 20ish minutes, and at 30 hours in I've been through more than half a year of game time. Sadly, though, the game is too crashy. At least once a month I've lost a day, and that's aways on a day where lots of important things happen - timed events, quest progress, dating or unusual interactions with NPCs, all stacked up - and where I might have had to pause and alt-tab out a time or two, because, again, underpowered save system. After the third or fourth crash I really can't be bothered to play through that particular full entertaining day again.

Maybe I'll come back to it - in a few months? But that's not a level of craft I'd recommend to others.

That people are raving about this just reveals to me that different people like different kind of games, and that I was careless buying during the Steam sale. :(

"Narrative strategy game" is an idea that keeps coming around and sounding cool but not really clicking for me.

It feels like the only reasonable way to play is:
* play the game until something you do unexpectedly triggers what the game designers thought should be the next narrative beat
* reload, and avoid triggering that action while figuring out the game / building up your strength / preparing for their "surprise"
* eventually trigger it, and play forward until the next bit of "story" hits.

This feels like there might be a mechanically passable game, but the scenario layered over it is full of unclear communications and inexplicit expectations and I'm just stumbling through getting frustrated every time things threaten to blow up in my face. I might come back to this, but there's stuff sitting on my backlog that's got a great reputation, and more classic stuff that I've not really finished exploring, and my time on the gaming rig is pretty limited.

A breath of fresh air for about six hours. The endgame feels like it might be getting a bit grindy, and I have to groan at achievements set aside for hard mode / new game plus, but that half-dozen hours was worth the price.

Beautiful art & style choices, nice game design, marvelously not *pointlessly hard* yet requires some decision-making. Very peaceful.

I was a massive fan of Jeff's early work back in the 90s and 00s, but somehow his more recent work has lost me, and I'm at a bit of a loss to figure out why. Maybe just the competitive landscape and tastes shifting?

I'm not sure quite what went wrong here - general lack of polish? Terminal scope creep? Capture by kickstarter fans? A junior team trying for AAA and not able to pull it together? A postmortem, even something as tepid as the style of the old Game Developer Magazine, could be interesting reading.