Sir Slush
Nate   United States
 
 
I'm a screenwriter/novelist-in-training who mostly uses Steam to relax and de-stress. My favorite games are RPGs with good stories (à la Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Kingdom Hearts, etc), but I also enjoy platformers, stealth games and even the occasional brawler. Most puzzle games don't provide sufficient challenge for me to enjoy them, but if they have an innovative concept I'll usually like them as well.
If you read any of my recommendations, you will see that I also like hard games. That's somewhat relative; I don't enjoy getting frustrated any more than the next guy, but because I have fast reflexes and can accurately judge time and distance, most platformers need to work to give me a challenge. Everyone's different, I guess.
My favorite game on Steam right now is Nusakana, a game that has meaning to me in intangible ways.
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177
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177 Hours played
So, it has been a few months since I finished Nusakana. This is probably the first game to which I can't give an unbiased review, but I will try.

TLDR: Nusakana is the most character-driven life sim I have ever played. For those interested in the genre, I can't recommend it enough, but you will have to put in an investment.

Nusakana has many English/grammar errors, usually not enough to make sentences hard to understand, but enough that you sometimes have to guess the level of emotion with which something was said. It has several technical faults and a few broken collisions, and the combat, fishing and harvesting are generally uninteresting. It is also at the top of my 'list of favorite games', surpassing the others I had considered nearly-perfect by such a wide margin that I can't use a number system to score it.
As a general rule, I have avoided life sim games because the gameplay is uninteresting, and the characters are seldom 'real' enough to hold my interest. I'm not sure what made me pick up Nusakana, except I had the feeling there was heart to it. My expectations coming into it were that I would find it relaxing and hopefully the characters would feel real enough that I would enjoy it. Instead I found myself busily scrambling around the island with new friends, trying frantically to keep pace with all the various story-related quests that kept showing up. All of these quests feel integrated into Nusakana's world, instead of being merely RPG-style fetch quests with no purpose behind them or story-reward for completing them. After a few months the flood of things to do slowed down and I was able to find the relaxing pace I had been expecting, but there were still very few days without some special event to make it a unique day in my mind.

Character interaction is the big draw here, though. While many of the characters seemed to start as clichés (perhaps because I’ve seen all the clichés so many times), by the end of the game they formed the best supporting cast I've ever seen - and I've played Chrono Trigger, Fire Emblem (all of them, both good and cringe-y), Kingdom Hearts and Katawa Shoujo. You won't get as much interaction from any individual as you might in, say, a branching visual novel - think 2,000 words per person as opposed to 30,000 per person - and the interactions won't be as explosive, either. Think spending a day picking peaches as opposed to discovering your modified microwave is a time machine. But the characters start feeling more real as the game goes on, and the world feels more real as your interactions with it change. This is the only game I've played where I can say I was genuinely interested in every one of the 30+ characters by the end of it.

I will note that I had to give it a decent amount of time before it started to mean anything to me. My general thoughts while playing went like this:
0->25 hours: Hmm, this is OK. Better than I was expecting, anyway.
25->45 hours: I wonder if places like this still exist.
45->60 hours: I think I'd like to live here.
60->90 hours: It's weird to say that a game can affect you as a person because of how cringy that can sound, but this game did exactly that.

In closing:
--Technical score: 7/10. A good effort and no significant bugs, but lots of grammar issues and a few graphical ones as well.
--Story score: 9/10. Actually quite good, even if it gets confusing at the end. Everything gets explained, but you may need to hear it more than once. Things I had ignored because I thought it was hand-wavy game logic turned out to actually be key points.
--Gameplay score: 8/10. If you're looking for something relaxing, this works well. And if you're a completionist, be warned that I had to use about six pages of notebook paper for all the lists I created of things to do next, in what order, and how to go about it. You will enjoy it more if you play it without a guide, which isn't hard because no guide currently exists. =)

--My personal score: 13/10, and I actually mean that. I only had two perfect games before (neither of which are on Steam), so I don't use the word lightly, but 'perfect' games just can't compete with this.