Forager

I enjoyed many hours of this game, I own it through another platform, and would have recommended it to people due to it's generally chill gameplay that was oddly satisfying, but that completely changed when the original dev promised a bunch of complex features to be added in future updates and then left the project in someone else's hands for them to get caught by all the flak. if you look up the roadmap for the game, a bunch of promised features have watched their expected dates zoom past without even a peep from a game dev. hop frog burned his bridge with the guy he was going to have take over for him.

I love this game so much, and the GOG version actually WAS updated to 4.1.8, unlike what the other reviews are saying. It was just late. This is such an amazing, addicting progression game with an amazingly cute artstyle. Starts offf super simple but gets really complex the further you go in. Dungeon crawling/bosses, automation, catalogues to fill... Even has mod support with a bunch of full on expansions to the game! The problem is that whenever you load it up, you're greeted with a roadmap that was supposed to be finished 4 years ago. Multiplayer was cancelled and I can't even find HopFrog's Twitter or Trello. Amazing game but obviously aboandoned. :(

On paper, I should like this game, but after two and a half hours, I called it quits. This game is a real grind. During my time, I spent 95% of it mining rocks and trees, and with no upgrades in sight to speed things up, it just became more and more frustrating until I couldn’t take it anymore. Maybe I’m unfairly comparing it to games like Stardew Valley, but this game is incredibly boring. It might be due to its idle nature, but it turns out these kinds of games just aren’t for me. I’ll stick with the likes of Factorio, Satisfactory, and Stardew Valley.

The formula of a quicker Stardew Valley plus Zelda is certainly spot on, the pixel art is fine, the loop is engaging. But the stock standard game play repeats many failings the game should have learned from, like an opaque upgrade tree and poor targeting that will often have you damaging your stuff. Worse yet, there is some outright jank. The targeting is oddly lopsided as well as unpredicable and some squares are inexplicably blocked from building, sometimes due to a visible ground texture that seems irrelevant, somtimes due to intrusion from a neighbor that appears to leave the square clear. Road pieces are over expensive, forcing you to hack your way through more regrowth than you would if you could easily lay down a path, compounding placement issues. There's an awkward and misleading bow mechanic. Controls have failed on occasion, requiring restart. Cramped quarters make you eager to expand your land, but when you do you'll often feel robbed because you'll get a small, convoluted, or crowded area often centered on a disappointing "feature" like a one off chest or the museum. These issues make the available building objects seem rather pointless--so far there has been no room to fit most of them, let alone express any creativity. And what's with the giant cute radish people who tell you you're awesome and they love you while they hog your available space, only cry and plead horribly if you destroy them. ICK! Hardly the tone you would expect. I might have given 3 stars, but honestly a game with an addictive loop but mediocre execution is worse than a simply bad game due to the time you'll waste feeling compelled to play without enjoying yourself.

My 7 year old is playing this, learning english, math and getting organised. He enjoyes the progression and is always excited for a new skill or a new patch of land. The font could be more friendly for young ones, as some letters look very much the same.