Forager

The reviews saying the game is out of date are themselves out of date. GoG now has version 4.1.8 which includes all the steam updates except for one minor bug/translation fix.

This does NOT feel like a game. It's work. This is the worst possible kind of work: pure grind where the reward for grind is getting even more activities to grind. Forager feels like working 3 brain-dead jobs at the same time without getting any breaks. Whenever you level up, you acquire another activity to grind IN ADDITION to all the other activities you still have to grind. It's so stressful. Game is also broken in the sense that the best ways to beat it are to exploit the game mechanics. It's like the game was designed that way, which feels like cheating, but it's the only way to beat the game in reasonable time. Lastly, Boon shrine sucks and destroy your game.

This game offers a compelling blend of idle gameplay, crafting, and slow progression that kept me engaged for hours. The main draw is the constant sense of discovery—unlocking new recipes, building your base, and exploring new zones. It’s all about expanding your abilities, whether crafting gear, tackling challenges, or exploring. The loop of building, upgrading, and collecting is satisfying. However, in the endgame, the experience falls off. With all major content unlocked, your options narrow to pushing dungeons or rebuilding purely for creativity’s sake. Without fresh goals or meaningful progression, motivation drops. The dungeons were the highlight for me, with maze-like navigation, puzzles, and bosses, but there weren’t enough of them. The quests, though many, were basic fetch tasks or required items I hadn’t found yet. They provided some useful talents and stat boosts, but nothing game-changing. The humor didn’t hit the mark for me, but I appreciated the lighthearted, quirky tone. The game knows what it is: a grindy crafting and exploration title, not a deep narrative. There’s a lot to dig into—farming, potions, resource gathering, and more—making for a solid crafting system that’s enjoyable. Overall, I completed most of the game, earning about 85-90% of the achievements, but didn’t feel driven to pursue every last one. While the achievements do unlock costumes, I didn’t find the incentive strong enough to keep grinding. I’d rate it 4 stars. It’s a solid experience but loses one for lacking “wow” moments and replayability. Once you’ve unlocked everything, there’s little reason to keep going unless you’re invested in building your ideal base or farming dungeons indefinitely.

This game has all of the ideas you'd want to make a solid relaxing homestead building game that progresses over time, but it just didn't land any of the aspects well for me. combine that with really weird tile-set selection issues and really not great clarity in much of anything, it makes a first-time experience more frustrating and annoying rather than giving you a good sense of wonder and driving exploration of the systems. You get bogged down on a progression system that's really only intuitive once you understand it, which can absolutely crush progress if you don't select the right skills early on. It's a pretty saturated and very strong genre and it's really hard to go from something else to this and not see some of the flaws that could be avoided. Some people stll might enjoy this type of game, so if it looks compelling, I still say give it a look.

Played it quite obsessively for a few evenings and then sort of ran out of things to keep me interested. Good at giving you more and more stuff to unlock but most of what you're doing is just grinding to unlock the next thing. Combat is so easy it's pointless.