Terroir

Nice idea, boring game. Requires you to memorize or write down a ton of things, because you can't look up basic stuff like your wine reviews, or even different wine characteristics (the in-game manual is very clunky to use, and can't be accessed while you're making the decisions about the wine production process). The overall user experience is poor at best, and frustrating very often. I wanted a nice lazy game to chill around, but this is nowhere next to that.

(Game received for free) No fun at all. The RNG is terrible: fungal rot hits my grapes all the time no matter what, ruins everything and I don't produce enough grapes to make wine to make up for the losses. Can I do something about this? If I can, the game doesn't tell me. The in-game guide gives no good explanation for the rot. In fact, it seems give false information about the rot. And if I happen to get lucky and the rot doesn't strike, my vines stop growing or grow too much and the ripeness level stays too low. I've only played the game for a hour, but gameplay cycle is rather quick and I just got tired of failing and restarting over and over again.

The mechanics are sound and the overall concept is spectacular, there are a lot of details here begging for better execution. Gameplay is absolutely ruled by RNG which you can only nudge, the "easy" setting is just barely playable. Diseases and pests terrorize you at random, and there's nothing you can do to stop or mitigate them. It's impossible to get a leg-up or to save money, for every random good year there are three bad ones. It's a failing-small business simulator; which is very frustrating because there's a good game at the core, begging for a little more development. Something that illustrates this, nearly all the guides say to build a tavern to increase your profits and prestige. That's fine, but it costs $250k, your starting cash is $70k, and after hours & hours of gameplay I've never managed to save more than $40k. The one good harvest is offset by constant, random disaster.

Can't CDPR who runs GOG actually cough up enough money for a decent giveaway. All these free games are bad. I get that's why they're free cause no one wants to buy them but this is just another awful game in the sea of giveaways.

It really absolutely isnt. I dont remember if i paid or not for this... i hope i didnt. It's shockingly frustrating. the UI is something off a macromedia era p* game. And it functions like one. half of the important, need to know info (optimal wine blends, which upgrade should be taken first and where/how to get it) are only available online. The assets and ui both look like they're off a free pack from unity store. It's a micromanaging game that runs on RNG (which should be a red flag tbh), where every single upgrade is massively overpriced and underwhelming.... and where Rnjesus is very, very hostile. if you like making 5 star wines from unripe grapes, never win a single award ever and struggle to stay afloat, it's great.