Pine

Please note that this review doesn't include all my experiences, just some of the salient ones. I enjoyed the game, but it is tempered with the negatives. The story is nothing to right home about, but at least the devs have tried to make you emotionally invested in it. A beautiful world has been created and it is living and breathing. The faction affinity mechanism requires work and lots of grinding. You need to be 'Friend' with a faction in order to trade, but the game doesn't tell you when you are friend. It is a matter of trial and error and you may lose time earned resources. Crafting exists. There are different gear sets, weapons and armour. These require blueprints, called 'Ideas' in the game, in order to craft. However, a lot of them you will find after you have need of them. Some are locked behind puzzles, which you can't get access to until about mid-game when you have what you need in order defeat the puzzle. You get excited to have defeated the puzzle, but the reward is, 'Oh, that's worse than what I already have'. The best gear set is the Beagalite set, which you can get fairly easily (Time spent grinding) from an NPC. Two pieces of the set you will have to craft. Because it is fairly easy to get, it kind of makes the other sets superfluous. Spend time farming Beagalite. Platformimg is a pain, the game is not intuitive in that way. Terrain textures keep popping in and out. Controls are not very responsive. The game requires quick slots for weapons. Having to go into your inventory everytime to switch weapons becomes tedious. Lots of collectable resources, some of which I found no use for. Puzzles are not my thing in general, there are a lot of them and two of the three vaults were a pain. I would recommend it, but get it in a sale.

Sadly the game is not very well optimized. In my not so simple machine, I had to put the lowest resolution and graphical settings. :-( And it still runs slow... really a shame, I hope they can optimize this further otherwise I won't play anymore. Also, the game crashed 3 times in the white companies logos before the main menu. In the 4th time, it loaded. And finally, loading the first game took forever from my external HD, but that would be expected I guess. Still, the game looks fun, played a bit, but too low framerates...

Pine has a beautiful art style, an impressive sound track and very quirky, charming ideas. Exploration is fun, interactions with the creatures are sparse, but interesting, and crafting is simple, but useful. Unfortunately, all the good ideas amount to very little in the way of gameplay. The "simulation" aspect makes the world feel more alive, but has no noticeable impact on the story. Pine is buggy like a Bethesda game, and sometimes you have to load an old save. There is unmotivated graphics pop-in and pop-out. Fighting feels clunky and unbalanced. And the game ends rather quickly. Recommendation: Buy it on sale.

It actually makes me motion sick. This is the first game I've encountered in about 40 years of gaming that's managed that, though I suspect it's not an achievement the devs were after. As far as speed goes, I'm finding it just fine (running on an AMD R9 280, with an 8 core Piledriver chip from 2014). I ran it in 'Beautiful' setting (1920x1080) and it felt smooth. The crafting side (and having to sneak around, find ingredients, and trade for what you need) is looking very nice indeed. It's a great premise, but that whole motion sickness issue is preventing me playing more.

For the most part i enjoyed this simple exploration game. a bit put off that it wouldnt allow you to choose your own avatar, but i quickly got into the game and was zooming around picking up stuff. pretty seamless controls, no problems there. combat was easy as well and i quickly learned when i should skeedadle or stay and fight. music was charming and it was fun to loot and scavenge and find special orbs to gain higher level armor. crafting was satisfying. After 22 hrs and my 5th time round the world looking for the same quest item/zone I gave up. Why? horrid map and quest log. If you miss the dialogue text given at time of the quest thats it. You may get a rough circle area indicated on the map for some quests if youre lucky. i think you can access entire conversations somewhere but i couldnt be arsed going thru all that lot to glean some clue on a quest i had ages ago where im supposed to go next. sure you can put a flag on the map but no notes and those flags stay on your horizon until you remove them no matter how far away you are. so at one time i had at least 10 giant icons cluttering my horizon until i got a clue and deleted them all. a better option would be to allow you to turn them on your display at you own need. not that they did much good. Another thing that soon grated was the forced story line, why i couldnt broker peace between the clans was irritating. they forced you to cause drama and mayhem as a lesson. just let me do my own thing in game, learn the lesson via pictographs or dialogue given by npcs. i dont want to become a war god, i would rather everyone got along and traded together happily. i really would have enjoyed crafting upgrades to a homestead instead. buy it on deep sale and enjoy the good bits, leave it when it gets old.