Recent reviews by Twisted_Code

seems like a solid concept. I took my time doing the tutorial, and it tickles the same parts of my brain that Factorio and Satisfactory do, though I'm concerned for what the endgame is like. It seems like you might be able to completely exhaust all resource patches and not be able to get more, unless resources regrow or something. There is also seemingly a hard limit on how far your workers would be able to get before keeling over, though maybe there is research for this that's just not available in the demo.
Either way, I think I'll probably, though I'm going to sleep on it first, give the full version a chance. Rest assured though, that I will update this review if it goes poorly.

I got this as part of a prerelease bundle for Prison Architect (Introversion was PA's developer before they sold it to Paradox Interactive), so I have to admit I didn't play much, but the little bit I did play it seemed like a solid concept. Just not really my genre, I'm not much of an RTS/wargame fan.
I may give it another try in the future, and if I do I will try to remember to update this review.

Nothing like the sound of track #16 — "Automation" to get you in the mood to grow a factory and become a scourge to Nauvis' natives. I feel like that track alone was worth the price.

Charming farm life simulator with RPG elements. Grow crops, fish, do quests, make friends (And 'roommates'?), explore, and more!

I just started, and already I can tell they put a lot of thought into the design of each of the NPCs. They each have their own dialogues and quests, likes and dislikes, and even their own schedules for where they can be found on a given day. For instance Harvey is the local doctor, but when he's done tending to townspeople's annual (or in one noteworthy case, more frequent) checkups at his clinic, he heads back to his room and then later heads out to socialize at the local alcohol establishment.
I think this is critical to setting it apart. I haven't played a lot of simulation games, so my comparison here may not make a lot of sense, but in a lot of RPGs I've seen and most that I've played, there's no concept of the time of day, NPCs just hang out at their shops indefinitely. Some might try to break away from this by having a day night cycle, but Stardew takes it a few steps further. During different seasons and at different times of the day, different NPCs do different things. There's still a fairly predictable program behavior behind it all, but that's okay, having to learn their routines in the first place is what makes it fun!
And, as you might expect, all of these intricacies can play into your professional career as a farmer. It's important to know, for instance, that the General Store is open most of the day… unless that day is Wednesday, a fact I thankfully learned early on. And that's the thing, NPCs' schedules affect when you can do tasks like shopping at their establishments. You can also randomly get edible gifts in the mail from a certain NPC, with the probability depending on your friendship statistic with them. I'm still exploring these interactions but I suspect friendship and knowledge of their routines may also affect selling prices or other things. I guess I'll just have too see!

Review to be continued at a later date!

how is everyone getting this to work? I can't seem to get past the "Flash Player is required to play games on this app" thing. I tried multiple flash versions, but it would just run the "installer" you gave it (it doesn't actually distinguish installers from things like Flash Projector, a standalone flash player), then return back to the "flash player is required" screen the second the installer closed.
I eventually had to bypass this app completely and run one of the SWFs via flash projector. That sort of worked, but I wasn't able to login because —as far as I can tell— the login page doesn't actually exist on their server. That alone makes me somewhat skeptical of the positive reviews…

I don't know how you managed to fail so badly implementing such a theoretically simple game.
Well, I know part of the reason, anyway: $

Complaints from when I initially reviewed the game:
First of all, requiring me to make a separate account AND the third-party developer's launcher. Steam ID could solve the first one fairly trivially, and the second one is probably just for DRM & advertising purposes. besides feeling like I'm the product, using their launcher means I get prompted to "allow this program to make changes to your computer" no less than 3 times whenever it wants to update. Don't get me wrong, I get you want to keep your software up to date, and this may require changes to the registry among other things, but could you please let me decide when it updates, since it's supposedly my computer? And why does it need to elevate THREE OR FOUR TIMES? Speaking as an IT professional, UAC prompts are not something I would want users to get complacent about, so I cannot condone needing more than one UAC elevation per play session.
Secondly, I can't even get the stupid game to launch on my laptop! It launched like one time, but now every time I click play, whether on the third party launcher or on steam, it launches and then closes after a few seconds. My laptop configuration is not that different from my desktop, what gives?
Finally, and maybe this is just a bit of a nitpick, but the lag while playing a hand (specifically while the server processes that a card was played) seems a bit extreme, sometimes it's as much as 3-5 seconds. It's not as though there is a lot of data that needs to be exchanged, right? It's a card game, what is so complicated about "Player 1 played yellow 6"?
Additional complaints as of 2023-10-09:
I got this game to be able to play it with my family, so why is there not an option to play without the turn timer and, if I so desire, without computer players? They make sense in a public lobby, but in a private one they can be just plain annoying especially when there's no option to adjust it at all.
Speaking of which, if my family member gets accidentally dropped from my private lobby due to connection error or the like, there does not seem to be a way to allow them to recover and rejoin the game, even if it's a multi-hand match. It really makes me feel like private lobbies were an afterthought, but for me they are the most important way to play.
I will not go into detail about how much I dislike the AI players as teammates, I already went into extensive detail about that on Ubisoft's Discord server. I don't feel like repeating myself here, since honestly as bad as the AI can be, it's one of the main reasons I'm still going to play this game instead of playing tabletop simulator: I don't feel like scripting my own AI (and I really don't care for Lua). I might someday, though.
Oh, and there's a bug where sometimes you can click on a valid card and it won't let you play it at all. That's just plain annoying and it crops up randomly.
edit 2023-11-02:
nothing has improved, it's just gotten worse. Today ubisoft's friends list feature wasn't working and I struggled to invite my family member to a match. I ended up having to go around it. and in the process of troubleshooting that, the game crashed one time without any obvious error message. Again, as an IT professional, any error message, even a vague error code, is better than nothing!

Edit: 2024-06-13 Most of these issues (Including, intermittently, the aforementioned difficulty launching the game) still exist. Maybe someday I'll care enough to reword this into github style issue format, but currently I feel like I would be doing Quality Assurance's job (because they sure as hell didn't do it)

edit: so basically, a EULA change not too long ago granted the company incredibly excessive data collection permissions simply by playing the game. It even included something about countries with less restrictive data privacy regulations, which seems to open the door for selling consumer data to China.
Sorry, but unless you are giving me something in return for the data, like using my address for shipping, you can't have it. Uninstalled!
original review, before I realized the kind of corporate scum I'm dealing with:
So far, it seems like a game I could probably get into, if I didn't have to keep starting over the tutorial due to various reasons like "the tutorial is way too long" and "bugs that have been in the game for 4 years", I still recommend getting it, because it seems like a solid game underneath all the mud (technical debt) they've let accumulate, but I definitely can't recommend paying full price for it. At least, not until/unless they rework the tutorial.
(personally I got it through Humble Monthly a year or 2 ago, at a huge discount. Not free, but it definitely makes the sting of restarting repeatedly slightly better.)

Good game so far. I have only one complaint:
it currently crashes when I try to force it into windowed mode using steam's "-windowed" parameter. Please add support for this parameter, and ideally an option to toggle fullscreen in game. I know this is a relatively straight port of an older game (which I never had the opportunity to try when it was in its prime), so I'm sure there's some technical reason you didn't add any modern Q0L features at all... *ahem?*
...but honestly I kind of need this for accessibility reasons. I want to use Windows' on-screen keyboard (OSK) for the rare keyboard control (yes I know it's a point and click, but I also need to be able to pause), but if I drag the OSK in order to see something on screen, full-screen programs like this will minimize (because a different window activated). I have to resort to enable the "keys for moving the window around the screen" option in the OSK settings, which adds otherwise unneeded bloat to the layout.
It's incredibly inconvenient, but not a dealbreaker.

I'm kind of on the fence about this. It's definitely a good game on its own, but I feel like the commonalities between this and the original Autonauts dilutes the value of both games (if you get both). On the other hand, that value is increasing as long as Denki continues to improve the common codebase, so long term I think it might be justified.
For now though, I'm not sure I can recommend paying full price, especially if you miss the launch bundle.

pros:

• educational value: This game taught me a thing or two about economics. For instance, when I read the definition of "hostile takeover" on investopedia, I merely thought to myself "oh, so that thing you're supposed to do to your opponents in OTC. Got it!".
  
• I'll expand this list later. It's been a while since I played but I'm planning to play today

cons:

• game lacks (or at least lacked last time I played) an autosave feature for single player games, which frustrated the hell out of me when it crashed after several hours (I was using the pause feature) into a game. That's why I stopped playing before and I'm hoping they've fixed it...