A game tailor made for management nuts. The game is often compared to stardew valley, and while it shares the genre, I think that is not an entirely helpful comparison for the player. Like stardew and its influences, you are in the position of managing a graveyard, this is your primary revenue stream. You receive corpses, and have the choice of either butchering it for useful (and illegal) substances and burning the evidence, or giving it a burial and crafting decorations to increase your churches prestige. You also must garden, mine, and dungeon delve to further your skill set and unlock esoteric components needed to further your quest. Unlike stardew, this is a game that revels in optimisation, and technology trees. You must learn its rules and spend hours optimizing your time in order to progress or the game will punish you. This can be enjoyable for a certain kind of person (ie me) but not everyone. There is no character interaction outside of quests, and while they are amusing, this means you have no form of "downtime" everything you do is either industrious or a waste of time, and you will always be two steps away from the thing you need to progress. There is a definite emphasis on management over simulation, more of a manual Factorio than Stardew. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just something to keep in mind. The quest design is quite poor in my opinion. There are quests given early in the game that are uncompletable until you sink in a good 10-15 hours of game play. In retrospect I think this was a hamfisted approach attempt at giving the player direction into late game activities, but, since they are given alongside tutorial style quests it leaves the player confused, believing they are doing something wrong. The dungeon delving aspects are also very poorly done, and just not fun in my experience.
I bought this game entirely on the premise. The somewhat niche concept of a rogue like dungeon crawl combined with store management and crafting seemed right up my alley. And the game delivered on that, in the initial stages the game was captivating in its gameplay and its graphics. The pixel art is absolutely gorgeous, and full of life and vibrancy. But, as the game went on, its lack of depth began to show through. While it is presented as an equal split between the dungeoneering and shopkeeping, money becomes so plentiful by the second dungeon that you needn’t touch the shop at all. While this option is good for those who do not care for the management side of the game, it’s rather disappointing for me, who really craved complexity from that side of gameplay. If you do want to stick with the shop, you’ll find the mechanics disappointing, just a case of tweaking prices up and down till you find the sweet spot, then, that’s it. You just wait for people to hurry up and buy your things so you can go back to dungeon delving. You can expand the shop, but this only gives you more slots to sell items, the mechanics remain uninteresting and repetitive. Then there is the town. The town is gorgeous. The pixel art and musical accents shine here, and the characters are all so full of personality. But they never have anything to say. Most npcs pull from a pool of generic lines, that is exhausted after talking to two or three of them. There are a few that hint at having further character beneath the façade, but they only get one or two lines to say before they repeat themselves endlessly, only finding something new to say once you’ve opened up a new dungeon, meaning each npc will be repeating the same two lines for hours of gameplay. I wish there was a point to talking to these people. If they could implement social aspects, alla Stardew valley, it could've been an interesting and compelling side of gameplay. As it is, the game is just good. And that's a real shame.
This game scratches a ten year old itch, and scratches it beautifully. The premise of the game is simple, you control a group of animals, all with a distinct set of genes, and it's your responsibility to keep the population fed and growing healthily throughout the generations. These genes are incredibly diverse and interact in complex ways, with dominant and recessive traits, and genes that interact with each other to affect your animal on the whole, for instance, your nichlings fur pattern genes will do didly squat for camouflage if they have the wrong fur colour genes. All this information is shown in a way that's simple, and easy to understand without compromising on it's depth and intricacy which is very impressive. On this merit alone it serves as an excellent educational tool, showing how populations can change over time, and diverge to form new species, all in a way that's natural and intuitive. You can start with a pair of terrestrial, flat footed like herbivore and selectivly breed your way to a race of amphibious, duck-billed, shellfish eaters if you want to. Over all this was incredibly fun, with astounding depth, beautiful visuals, and a clean interface, however, while the games content was incredibly deep, it's all just presented to you in one big lump, without giving you any real direction. There's a short story mode, but it's more of a tutorial, really, only lasting half an hour before it lets go of your hand. I had fun with the sandbox mode for a while, trying to set myself new goals, but found myself finding one particular "niche" and found myself stuck in it, only experiencing a fraction of the games content, which is a real shame. This game is in desperate need of a challenge or scenario mode of some kind. Just giving us the option of having concrete goals to aspire to, or some kind of handicap, like environments that change under you, would really help to give the game broader appeal, and more lasting replay value.
