Terroir

This game is only worth playing as a lesson on how to not make games. Let's start with the good: The art style suits the pace of the game and the interface invokes the theme rather well. The music and sound effects create an easygoing relaxing atmosphere. The overall presentation is a cohesive whole and is not unattractive. The mediocre: The game has a text based tutorial which fails to explain any of the indepth interactions of the game systems. The interface is clunky at best. The game does not in any way explain what characteristics your wines should have to get a good rating. The process of wine making consists of multiple stages where you can pick what method to use but at first you only have one methodfor each step. The bad: RNG is king and you are at best a petty court noble. Player input at best can slightly correct RNG in their favour. The ROT event is absolutely unbalanced. one year you get no rot and 1.5 tonnes of grapes per plot. The other you get rot all year and get 0.3 tonnes. The ripeness stat seems to go up and down with one discernable reason. The interface while clean is confusing at best and doesn't adhere to convention at worst. TL;DR The RNG will fuck you over for no reason and at best you can slithly mitigate it.

NOT RECOMMENDED. It is not fun and there is barely any gameplay besides min-maxing some wine attribute numbers. The UI is mobile app simple, yet requires diligence, e.g. closing a pop-up screen by right-clicking on it, not just anywhere like in most games. Most of the content is text and numbers. There is a short in-game tutorial that encourages looking into a 30+ article text tutorial index. It's a major reading assignment of a game. The content is split between numerous small pop-up menus, meaning you get the micro-management feel even when you are doing the most basic stuff at the beginning of a playthrough. The worst part is that the game refuses to tell you the variety-specific optimal wine attribute numbers and tells you to "experiment" with it, basically wasting your batches of wine and gameplay time and encouraging save-scumming and cheat-sheeting the numbers from some wiki guide. The wine critics give you vague hints about the numbers, though it is turning the knife in the wound of failure. That is because apparently you do not unlock good stuff such as better wine critics unless you make perfect 5-star wine. The 30+ article in-game tutorial would be tolerable if it take itself like a game and also included humor. The game is a way too serious. It tries to replicate few real-life wine business aspects, yet is simplified to the point of not feeling real. It should have picked one of the extremes: to be a game or to be a book. The only good attempt at a hybrid is I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (mostly because of a decent story, okay but not great) and this one is nowhere that good. So you work as a wine producer and try to get a high score in Terroir. This is the 1980s level of goal quality. Because of its real-life basis, you cannot be creative in the game, it does not allow it. You might as well work IRL and earn money if this is what you like to do.

The game has a nice atmosphere and the music is calming, which you will need with the interface glitches that make your life and gameplay hard in a really bad way. Some stuff my gf mentiones, who is playing the game with smoking ears from rage: - The interface is hard to interact with, the small arrows are hard to press with the big, oversized mouse pointer. - The pointer itself - The day-night cycle may seem like a nice touch, but it has nothing to do with actual day-night cycle (the game is more over a year-cycle), however "night time" makes it harder to see the map. - The game is lacking on the balance side. On easy it is hard to make good wines as you don't have the tools, however for upgrading you need a looooot of many and even more renown, which will be hard with wines. - Also in many cases the interface fails to tell you what is happening. Buy a field, try to plant, you have the money, the icon is there, yet the "Plant" button is grayed out. Why is that? - During chance&circumstances missions you don't have a tracker. Surrender 3000 bottle of wine to the military. Nice. How many bottles did I already sent there way? - Log does not contain information about the tips that you can see during review. All in all, the game seems pretty unfinished. The idea was good, but the execution is really poor. Avoid it.

Yeah, this game is probably good, probably bad... How could I know when I cannot even begin to understand it. You can do things, or they say you can, but some things do other things, perhaps, I don't know. How could I know when I don't understand what I am doing? For lack of a proper tutorial, this game fails.

The idea is neat. The presentation is decent. However there's not much going there besides trimming the bush (pun intended), and selling wine. The worst part is that it really doesn't matter how bad is your wine it will eventually sell. So you only need 5 star products to kick start some random events that can alter your gameplay in good or bad way. Add more gameplay, and it could be a strong 3/4 stars game.