As Far As The Eye

The game is entirely about the art. It is very pretty. Bad mechanics, bad UI, bad repetitive audio (I guess the music is kind of chill), the turn system is pointless, everything takes a bunch of turns and you have to click through turns rapidly to do anything.

A game that's a blend of 4X and FTL? Play a 4X game where the goal is to amass a certain amount of resources before the turn timer counts down before traveling to the next "sector" and try to reach the end. What a great idea. What a terrible execution. It's very pretty to look at, reminiscent of Endless Legend. The GUI is very messy and unclear though. Which is bad considering how RIDICULOUSLY tight you have to be, with even perfect play not being enough to survive. You will frequently receive goals to amass resources that are not present on the map. The option for trading on the market is there, but the exchange rate is so bad that it's just not realistically feasible. On top of that, the RNG can instantly end your run with bad events in ruins (how often did a single event end your run in FTL?). To give you an idea, even half the tutorials are nearly impossible without absolutely perfect play, mathing everything out exactly up to a dozen turns in advance. The game is a great idea, but it's like they came up with the idea and the mechanics for the game, then did absolutely ZERO playtesting to balance the economy, map generation, or difficulty. Avoid until this is sorted out.

FATE (Far as the Eye) is a tough game, don't let the gorgeous cute art style fool you. It's like what if Civilization mixed with animal crossing and took lessons from Dead Cells on how to be brutal. Your goal is to reach the eye before the wave kills your tribe, each mini level called a halt you have a goal, to collect a certain amount of resources. The depth of the game is something else and really shines due to many factors you need to take in account per halt: Build orders, building placement to optimize duration of collecting, terrain to traverse, hunting, farming, cooking, small diplomacy with other tribes, exploring ruins and deciding which technology to research. Add to that random events called vagaries and you have a really tough but very deep game that will provide dozens of hours of gameplay. Before the patch I would have given the game a 3, due to the vagaries being really unbalanced and sucking the fun from the game, but the devs responded fast and now they've been balanced to the point the game really shines. The game is hard, and you will fail but hey, that what Rougelites are all about.

I really like this game. I already spend a lot of time playing it (50+ hours) and its still fun. Takes a little time to go trough the tutorials (Campaign), Game is Complex, but the techniques are easy to remember and to use. Is very relaxing if you keep the settings of Custom games low (like no negative Traits and lots of positive, short path) but can be very hard and challenging if you add more negative Traits and longer path. The Karma-effect (where you get more negative effects later if you waste resources and misuse the generosity of maps) is also very refreshing and a good reflection to our everyday wasting. You should not harvest/damage more than you really need to avoid later misfortune. This puts your managerial and planning skills to a good test. The graphic is also very nice, with lot of colors and good design.