Recent reviews by CoyoteTraveller

Excellent vibes for a sudoku-style game. Nice and relaxing, I keep coming back to it over the years.

The dev studio asked their fans to review bomb their own game to fight back against Sony, and won. The absolute mad lads.

MAJOR ORDER COMPLETE

The animation is truly outstanding for a VN. Story is going to stick with me for a while. Not much in the way of branching paths.

I don't regret the time I spent playing, which is all I need for a "yes" recommendation. The campaign is (for the genre) short and sweet. That said, it doesn't bring much to the genre, there's a lot of frustrations, and a lot of things it could do better. I'd recommend other genre games before this (Factory Town is very similar and, IMO, strictly the better game).

The campaign is only eight hours long but it's a good one. Grab it while it's three bucks

I might sink a fair number of hours into it, but I don't think this is a great all-audiences game. It's nostalgia fuel for people who liked the original Master of Magic and don't want to run in dosbox. It needs some bug fixes and UI tweaks before it can even stand on its own two feet, but even then, I think I might be iffy on recommending it. My kink is not your kink and that's OK.

Lighthearted, cathartic game that's fundamentally about trauma. If you suck at coloring with a mouse, you'll probably feel better about it by the end of the game. Fills the same emotional space as Undertale (high praise).

It's basically 7 Wonders crossed with a hex-based 4x game. That's it, that's the game. Only played it against the AI so far but it's fun.

Good: The 3d engine is well implemented, and exploration has fun Subnautica vibes in places.
Bad: It's frustrating and slow to build a factory in first person. There's no way around it: this is the worst possible interface for the genre. Even the blueprint feature is a pain to use. I can't think of a better way to do the buildy parts unless it shifted to third person. They're doing the best they can, but this subgenre feels like a dead end.

This is mostly UI improvements to a dated game, but it fell out of the actually-improve-the-interface tree and missed every low hanging fruit branch on the way down. Badly executed all over. Want to build the best bed in your stockpile? ♥♥♥♥ you, the build menu is grouped by type of wood not quality, and you have to expand every category individually. Farms don't even show a visual difference between "things are growing" and "it's empty", that's how lazy this is.

I could recommend DF for nostalgia purposes, but this update whiffed every chance it had to make the game more accessible. It's a tossup whether these controls or the originals are better, but I'd lean towards the original - there's a lot of micro in this game, and when you learn the keyboard shortcuts, you can go real fast. But on some of the menus where you used to just hit 'enter' to pick the first option, you're now forced to click, and it just feels slow and grating.

The new music is good, but the new random sound effects are obnoxious. You will learn to hate that hawk within the first hour or two.

Honestly, it's hard to disrecommend Dwarf Fortress since I had such great adoration for (and was a donator to) the ASCII original. But DF gives a striking look at just how much Rimworld and other modern genre games revolutionized the genre's core design fundamentals. Dwarf Fortress was a pioneer, and it revealed a lot of annoying busywork in its gameplay that its successors removed. The Steam version has stayed true to its original design and now it's dated as hell.

The crashes don't help, when the game takes forever to autosave and doesn't do it very often. If you pick this up, give it some time for the crashes to get fixed or you're going to lose a lot of progress and be very unhappy.