As Far As The Eye

Good ideas poorly executed. Terrible interface, very difficult to know where to click or see needed information. Feels like a bunch of art school students directed a video game.

As Far As The Eye is a fun game with soothing music and a very pretty art style. There are three game modes: - The Campaign (which is the tutorial). - The regular game (where you can follow the journey of different tribes). - Custom Game. Playing the normal game can be quite difficult so if you enjoy playing more relaxing games you can pick Custom Game and tailor the settings to your preference to make it as easy or difficult as you want :) In Custom Game you can choose how many Pupils to start with, how many positive and/or negative traits they'll have, how much food you start with, you can turn off food consumption and/or disasters, and set length of the journey. This way you can turn a difficult game into a calm game if you just want to relax and unwind and enjoy the beauty of As Far As The Eye :)

Overall, I really want to like this one. I came to it after finishing all current Outlanders content and it looked similar enough to give it a go. This one is much more unforgiving and sadly without the care and stage design of Outlanders, instead relying on procedural generation of stages, it can often completely completely block your path forward. Every map (called halts in game) requires a certain amount of resources to go forward, but you won't know what resources a halt has until you are already in it. While the game provides a couple of tools to mitigate this a bit, namely: choosing a different path with different needed resources (not always available) or the "market" (which allows trading one type of resource for another, but with far too high an exchange rate to be useful), as mentioned, these aren't super great at mitigating this problem. Either more paths need to be offered, the rate of exchange in the market needs to be lowered, the algorithm needs fine tuning or perhaps just tune down the difficulty a touch so mistakes are more forgiving (more on this below). I breezed through the tutorial campaign missions. But the meat of the game is procedurally generated stages where I have tried almost a dozen times to finish even the first one of those with little success due to this resource problem. The game is, as others have mentioned, also quite difficult despite having such a pleasing and laid back aesthetic. I wouldn't mind this so much if it weren't so easy to stuck behind the eight ball of the random resource spawns. With how punishing the game can be for even minor mistakes on the player's part, it feels especially bad to lose due to randomization. Either one or the other could be tweaked as well. Another part that feels bad is that failure on any given halt means a restart from the beginning of the whole journey. Which is get is a rogue-like thing, but I could do with out it to be honest. Only recommended for those that absolutely want a challenge.

Don't be deceived by its cartoonish aesthetics, it's a brutal strategy rogue-like and a pretty good one.

It's is a good resource management game.