Dwarrows

Dwarrows is a mix of different styles of non-violent gameplay, all woven into one cohesive whole. Puzzle solving, pet collection, exploration, questing and city building. There's always lots of goals to work towards, and being able to switch to some other task at any time means that it doesn't get boring. Overall it plays really well and has ~15 hours of content. However, it could have used more time in early access. Even though it has heaps of content and you can tell they've already spent a lot of time on making content, there are still aspects of the game that feel completely unpolished. It has broken achievements, a frustratingly slow and repetitive minigame for pet taming, a game-breaking bug near the ending (I can't get the queen to visit because I completed the quests in an unexpected order), and just generally annoying pacing where at multiple points you can't even make any further progress until you find certain hidden objects that allow you to expand your resource storage. So overall, there's a lot of fun to be had, the bugs/lack of polish doesn't ruin the game but it's enough for me to deduct a star. Probably worth buying in a couple months once they've fixed it.

Build a town, explore the map in 3d platforms style and solve puzzles. The platformer aspect is very light compared to Mario64. Not much conversation or character interaction beyond a few interesting leading story arcs. What kept us playing was the exploration of the lands and the building of the town. Others will like the puzzles more - but this is not intended for the insanely smart. I found this great to play with 7 yo, with some puzzles needing older kid or adult to solve. Its friendly and not scary - no weapons. Only down point was the graphical optimisation, hitting the CPU over the GPU. Finished in around 20 hours.

The time just slips away while playing Dwarrows. You can't die and it feels like there are endless puzzles and mysteries to solve. The puzzles get harder as you move through the game, but there is an overall low amount of platforming (which I am bad at) and the world-building aspect means there is always new things to do in town or out in the wilderness. It is very family friendly and a great game to help pass the time.

So I'll start with the positives: 1. Relaxed pace 2. Cute puzzles 3. Nice blend of base building and exploration The negatives 1. I don't think the creators know the conotation of the word "coloniser'' 2. Sometimes bringing the people together and mining for stuff is very tedious