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Thank you for starting this thread, Arsenic! As promised, I'm going to do a big post on my favorite type of Life Sim games: Growing Up games.  Alter Ego is probably the grand-daddy of all of them. Written in 1986, you take a person through their entire life, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style. Choices made alter your stats, your stats change which choices are available to you, and you get the thrill of living vicariously exactly the life you would have chosen, assuming that the game designer wrote those options into the game and you figure out the stat thresholds you need to hit to achieve it. The link in the title is to free version on the web; you can also buy it on Steam for $8.  But really, Princess Maker 2 is the classic that really defined the genre in the West and most Growing Up games structure themselves like. You are a heroic adventurer who has saved the world! We actually don't care about that, and your adventures and the skills and talents you used to save the world are never spoken of or relevant again. But! Because you saved the world, the Goddess of Light has decided that when she bequeaths her daughter to the world, you will be the one tasked to raise her. So, essentially, a 10 year old girl is dropped on your doorstep and it's up to you to decide what skills she'll learn and stats she'll develop by scheduling classes and jobs for her. And you have to schedule jobs for her, because it turns out being the hero who saved the world pays jack poo poo and you can't even afford to feed her on your salary, so she has to earn her own keep. Classes and jobs increase some stats while reducing others (can't be Refined when you've spent the day mucking stables), so the core strategy is determining which stats you want to zero out first so that she no longer loses points there, and then moving her on to new jobs that zero out different stats. Along the way, you can send her off on JPRG adventures, where she does about as well as an 10 year old girl you've handed a wooden sword to does. You'll also have to manage her stress - if she doesn't have enough time off, she'll rebel and run away. Once she turns 18, you get a review of what she's learned and find out what her eventual career will be and who she'll marry. Did you turn her into a Princess by making her a soft, delicate goddess of manners who married the Prince? Or did you turn her into a Princess by making her a cold, hard, buff Goddess of War who married the Devil and took the royal crown by force? Or did you gently caress up a lot and she ends up as a librarian in some podunk town, married to someone who isn't interesting or famous but makes her happy, like some kind of loser? It's a weird, fun game but has some serious Japanese Otaku elements that you have to choose to ignore, like the fact that you can buy pills specifically to make her breasts bigger, or sexy clothes for her to wear, or that one of the jobs she can get at 16 is Sexy Dancer, or that you can maneuver her into marrying you when she turns 18 because that's somehow romantic in 90s anime style instead of creepy as gently caress. You can go through the whole game not engaging with any of those things and not lose out on anything, but they exist. The linked version is to the latest translation and release of the game; it originally came out in the early 90s in Japan and only really got a fan port over to English-language versions, and was largely available only as  . Despite that, it was pretty popular, and even has a great Let's Play put together by SynthButtrange (which shows the aforementioned Otaku stuff solely to mock it).The game had sequels in Princess Maker 3, 4, and 5, but none of those got the fan port that 2 did, and so none of them were nearly as popular over here. The gameplay changes a lot between each game, and I can't comment on how good or fun any of them are.  Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator is probably the closest modern game, mechanics-wise, to Princess Maker 2, but it eschews the Japanese misogynistic weirdness of sexualizing your daughter and instead embraces the Japanese anime weirdness of living on a giant flying city-mecha because indestructible kaiju roam the lands below. In the most recent battle with that kaiju, a 10 year old girl was found as a lone survivor. You aren't any world-saving hero this time around, but you're tasked with raising her and helping her cope with the trauma of being the lone survivor of her destroyed city, and the complete amnesia around her previous life. Once again you have to schedule your daughter's activities, and once again you have to choose schoolwork and jobs because the government handed you a young girl to raise without doing anything about making sure you could afford it. This time, there's no downside to jobs and classes - they all give you stat bonuses and no stat losses - but you have to play a tile matching mini-game with each one and doing badly at the mini-game can mean doing badly in the class. Balance taking time off to reduce her stress with keeping her workload high so that she qualifies for better and better classes, and help her navigate friendships with a dozen other characters in town, and setting her up for success in the obvious eventually showdown with the Kaiju that destroyed everything she once had. And once that Kaiju is vanquished, what life does Ciel live? That all depends upon the skills she learned, the friends she made, and how many times you hosed up that stupid goddamned minigame. It's a fun game, though much more grindy than Princess Maker 2 was, and suffers in that it was clearly released in episodes to keep Early Access buzz going, so there are a couple of big "oh no! cliffhanger moment!!!!" transitions that are more awkward than enjoyable, but over all, it's a very solid game if you're looking for something that lets you explore what it would be like to be a background character in a 1990s Giant Robot vs. Giant Monster anime.  Growing Up changes the format a bit, but is a great addition to the genre. Unlike the other Princess Maker 2-esque games here, it's not a fantasy or science fiction; the setting is America in the 1990s with all of the bright pastels, Rachel haircuts, and plaid skirt/doc martins combos you'd expect. Also, you're not guiding some poor kid who landed on your door to success - it's now your own life you're living, from birth up until graduating high school. The gameplay mechanics are pretty straightforward- as with other games, you're spending limited slots and points on activities to represent classes and time off, developing your traits based on what you choose (study science to get smarter, or play with animals to become more empathetic). Learning new skills and mastering those skills give bonuses to those stats, so it's fine to be a jack of all trades or a very focused master of one, and exploring the town and building relationships with other characters can open new locations where you can learn new skills (find out about the club to learn music! Get a season pass to the galleria to learn about art!). Maneuver through life and awkward awkward teenage drama and romance and find out what life you could have lived and what your adult like will look like. The other characters are probably this game's biggest selling point. There are a bunch of adults who are the same from game to game, and a dozen different characters your age who will grow up with you - but you'll only meet two or three of those kids each run, so there's a lot of replayability to learn about new people and their stories. The writing is great, and the music is outstanding - though it's very modern indie rather than appropriate to the '90s setting.  Finally for this huge post, there's I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, which came out only last week. It's - pun intended - stellar if you want a great "growing up" game. You are a young child in a hippie commune which is fleeing the devastated post-climate-change Earth for the promise of a new life on a planet discovered on the other side of a wormhole. While traveling through the wormhole, you stumble and hit your head, opening your mind to all of the various possibilities of your life that the universe has (and thus letting you skip events or completely short-circuit them on later playthroughs because your character knows what's going to happen!) Like all of the other games, every time period you choose an activity to do which increases stats, hang out and give gifts to friends to increase relationships with them, and spend ten years growing up on another planet to find out what your destined job will be and what happens to all of your friends. A number of things make this game really stand out in comparison to the others, though. First, the central game mechanic is a very well done card playing game - you draw cards from your deck, and have to figure out how to arrange them to make as many points as possible to hit the target numbers your activities require. Your deck starts out as a bunch of terrible crap, but you can earn new cards through life experiences and successes at activities- and some cards do better if you're focusing your development in a certain way; being good at everything is very hard to do. Second, the other kids you're growing up with are not just well-written, but maleable- unlike the other games listed here where characters have a very set path and you're really just choosing whether you're close with them or not, in IWATE characters will change depending upon what you do, or what events befall the colony. Annie is a carefree girl who loves sports, but if you gently caress up and let her brother die (or don't even know that it's an option to not gently caress up!) she's change into a hardline xenophobe in trying to process her guilt and anger over it... and then, if you keep talking to her and choosing options about peace and living with the planet, you can pull her back from the brink and at least get her to break up with the fascist rear end in a top hat who is encouraging her. IMO, it's the best of the games I've listed, though maybe that's because it's so fresh, but it's just the best written and has the best mechanics of the others from my playing of it. Are there any I missed? Let me know!
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Aug 30, 2022 01:59
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Yeah, Long Live The Queen could be on that list, but I think that at heart it's really more of a puzzle game than a life sim. While all of the mechanics look like standard Growing Up games - choose what to learn, schedule out those skills, etc. - there are a bunch of hard gates through the game where you get a Game Over if you didn't raise one specific skill to a certain level or make one specific choice in a dialogue. Which means that unlike Princess Maker and the rest - which encourage exploring and trying out a bunch of stuff and seeing what happens - LLTQ really has one path through it, and while you can have a little bit of variance in that path, if you don't follow that path first and foremost you lose. Edit: I may be bitter, though, because the blurbs I read about it heavily sold it as a successor to Princess Maker and I found it frustrating and un-fun to play the game over and over again only to die to some new 'gently caress you' each time
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Aug 30, 2022 04:03
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New game out - Potion Permit!   https://store.steampowered.com/app/1337760/Potion_Permit/ So, if you don't want to listen to me babble, it has a free demo you can download and try for yourself. Biggest warning: it's absolutely designed for controller support, and has no mouse support. So if you want to use kb+m, you need to get used to using the WASD keys for movement and JKL keys for inputs, where J and K are your main buttons. It's a standard Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley plot so far: welcome to the town where you're taking over a ruined building to establish yourself and make friends with all of the townsfolk! The big difference is that you're not farming - you're doctoring! Er, medicining? Herbing? Eh, whatever, you're gathering ingredients from the local forest and using them to make potions to sell for loot that you will immediately re-invest into decorations to make your shabby home less obivously-filled-with-holes. The second big difference so far is that at the start of the game, people actively hate you: you're following in the footsteps of the previous chemist who came here from the big city, and apparently he hosed everything up in a big way, so there's a lot of potential for interesting plot or maybe it just gets washed over once you get enough mini-games done, dunno, I haven't gotten through all of the demo yet. But those minigames are a big draw. Obviously, you're foraging and fighting just like in HM/SV, and there doesn't seem to be anything special or interesting about that, it's an HM/SV clone, not an ARPG or Zeldalike. But making potions is a puzzle where you're placing pieces into a grid to cover spaces, and there are limits around what kinds of pieces you can use and how many of them. Likewise, diagnosing patients has a button-timing mini-game, and of course there's a fishing game. So there's plenty to do that seems to require more thinking and planning than just hitting buttons to shove seeds in the ground. yes i know hm and sv have a lot going on in planning and allocating resources and energy that is very thought intensive and why those games are a lot of fun and talked about in the management thread Reviews so far are mostly positive, with the main complaint being the complete lack of mouse support for menus. Also some people complaining that there is no cat option, you must have a dog.
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Sep 22, 2022 17:33
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Jack B Nimble posted:So, which Life Sim games have the most combat and adversity? These games are definitely overlapping with a lot of things I like but I'm looking for something with a hostile environment. I think it'd be easier to flip it around - you want combat and adversity, what parts of a life sim do you like? Like, Hardspace Shipbreaker has a lot of adversity in it, especially as you're first learning it, but I'm not clear if it would have the life sim parts you want. Long Live the Queen has a poo poo-ton of adversity and a hostile environment, but it's more of a puzzle game than a real Princess Maker-type life sim. I Was A Teenage Exocolonist also has a poo poo-ton of adversity; nothing goes right and everything is pain on your first run, and you can push into explorations of the planet to constantly fight enemies if you want. But having said that, the central mechanic is all card game, it's not an ARPG.
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Sep 22, 2022 20:21
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I feel like you're angry that there's a tutorial, but I get where you're coming from. I'm enjoying it so far.
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Sep 23, 2022 00:48
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Yeah, so far it’s just “find a bad area on a person, play a minigame to diagnose, run off to play tetronimo to make the right potion”. It’s very light. I’m holding off on upgrading the cauldron because “make this tetronimo with only 5 pieces” actually adds some thinking into it. Definitely don’t go into this thinking it’ll be zacktronic type puzzles
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Sep 23, 2022 18:14
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Tism the Dragon Tickler posted:It's really good imo. The potion making is very simple on the surface but gets extremely complicated very quickly because you're balancing a whole bunch of different factors. Perfect balance for extra stars vs. higher base quality with bigger ingredients that don't have perfect ratios, sense bonuses, cost of ingredients, different branching cauldron upgrades, it's a lot to sink your teeth into. I'll add in: it's very Reccetear at its base, if you've played that - you're making potions, but you also have to decide which ones are for sale, and which ones go in the display window to attract customers, and every customer must be haggled with. Unlike Recettear, you don't just throw out numbers and see what happens - it's a little card mini-game where you have to balance taking too many turns (and thus getting stressed out and ending up in a downward spiral) vs. getting the price higher, and you can customize your deck and learn cards from other people to change out how you approach the game. It's not very deep, but it's fun, and a lot better than the system Recetear used. I just made it through the first contest and it was more of a nailbiter than I'm happy about. And I have no idea where to get the resources needed to get more cabinets or cauldrons, so I'm kind of anxious about the coming week. So yeah, it's a keeper.
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Oct 18, 2022 05:20
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Sure, but it’s possible to get past the first test without shelf or cauldron upgrades. I’m not sure I could’ve even afforded those upgrades, 300 - 400 coins on an upgrade in the first week feels like it would’ve wrecked my ability to make potions. And I believe one of the two most recent patches made the first few tests easier, so I don’t think anything is gated behind lucky drops.
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Oct 22, 2022 04:15
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Let us know how it is. Early reviews say that there's no romance element, so I'm a little leery to start with.
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Nov 4, 2022 17:44
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Jinnigan posted:maybe an overly specific request but are there any management/'community' games where you can raise villager stats such as self-esteem, confidence, socialbility, number of social connections, etc? i would like to live out a fantasy of building a meaningful and caring community. thank you in advance for your considerations In "I Was A Teenage Exo-Colonist", each other teenager has a stat which starts out hidden, but which you can influence in order to drive them to make different life choices as the game progresses. Tammy, for example, has a "self-confidence" stat which does what you'd expect, story-wise; Marz has a "Socialism" stat which determines whether her outspoken brashness is done for the good of the community or for her own self-aggrandizement; etc. It's more VN/Princess Maker than Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress, but it's also PC and very sci-fi. There are enemy creatures to fight, and... other things that happen that I don't want to spoil, but there's definitely a central conflict in the game.
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Nov 19, 2022 03:59
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It does and it brightens my day that we got you a game you liked and a great game a new fan!
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Nov 20, 2022 21:18
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Okay, so Rune Factory 5 is on sale for half price. I know people were saying it isn't great compared to Rune Factory 4 - which I already have and played a fair bit of - but is there a reason I shouldn't get RF5 even if it's not *as* good?
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Mar 7, 2023 02:13
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Jack Trades posted:Is that the series with extremely questionable "romance" options or am I confusing it with a different Japanese farm sim? Rune Factory 4 is the one with the "oh no, even though she acts like she's 8, she's an adult, wink wink, nudge nudge" character. Anyways, thank you all for the advice! I picked up RF5 and am going to try it out.
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Mar 7, 2023 15:47
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Okay, so I grabbed Sun Haven as well since it was finally out of Early Access, and I'm pretty tepid about it. It's very similar to Stardew Valley if SV was created by a Korean MMORPG shop: everything takes ten times longer than it should. Like, you go to the mines (as in SV) and you mine out copper (as in SV) so that you can smelt it into bars (as in SV) to make new tools (though you can make them yourself, unlike SV where you pay a guy to do it). But in Sun Haven, there are fewer copper nodes in each mine level, so it takes more time to get the same copper ore. And then they smelt to bars at 3:1, so you're getting a third of the materials from the same amount of ore, which again, you're getting less of. And now you have three armor slots to fill, so you actually need more copper bars to keep up with the game. And that's kind of where everything in the game goes. You need to chop down more trees to get more lumber to get one of the twenty machines that do things that an SV workbench does. You need to grind a few hundred monsters to get your character's skills up to where they can survive the fourth screen in the wilderness. You need to navigate conversation trees with neighbors and tell them what they want to hear because just talking to them doesn't raise friendship levels. The main plot involves a crap-ton of running back and forth between the same two or three people to relay messages. I mean, it's not all bad- there's a lot more: more crops to grow, more furniture to make and decorate with, more food to make, more ways to customize your character and make them unique in look and skills... it's just that it's slow to do all of those things, and it seems that every time you make a bit of progress some random event comes that stops you until you dig out from under it. I just made it through the first season to summer, and the mine is now randomly blocked and I need to pay 4 iron bars to re-open it, which is hard to get when the mine is blocked. I mean, it's not impossible, but it'll be expensive because I have to just go buy the stuff, and that means less money for everything else. It's definitely a game that makes your success feel hard-earned, at least.
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Mar 17, 2023 22:12
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LLSix posted:Mining gets a lot faster as you get more levels and mining talents. Mid-game I was able to consistently gather all the metal from 10 min levels a day. Deeper mine levels have more good rocks (and also more dangerous enemies). I don't remember the mine closing, that is a jerk move. If you haven't already bought the iron bars, I think they can drop from chests (of which there are reliably 1-2 across all the beach maps each day) They do, thank you! That got me enough that I didn't have to spend any money on it. Of course, while attempting to explore the beach, it turns out that there's another loving snorlax that has popped up to block passage between my house and the combat beach, so lol, lmfao I'm also half-way through the mining skill chart and still haven't gotten to room 10 because everything just take so long to do. Also, despite having installed the latest patch that they swears fixes it, pests still eat my crops protected by scarecrows. I get that this scratches the SV itch, and maybe I keep loving around with it for that reason, but it really feels like they made a bunch of design decisions without thinking through in any way whether it made the game more fun or more playable. Like, it is a serious annoyance that I have trouble telling if a patch of ground is watered or not, especially when there's a tree in front of it. It feels like being clear about that should be just the most basic design decision for user friendliness, and they just didn't bother. Quests pop up with no thought about whether I can get the resources they need, or tell me to go to a place by name with no way on the map to determine what the name means or references. Time spent in conversation and looking at your inventory and managing your inventory is not paused, so gently caress you if you're trying to figure out which things need to be shipped at 11pm. I just find it overall frustrating and grindy compared to SV's chillness.
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Mar 18, 2023 02:20
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Dirk the Average posted:I think overall the game's big issue is that it just lacks focus. There's a lot of stuff, but 99% of it is just fluff and cruft that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. That's exacerbated by the three towns being so disjointed from one another to the point where their crafting materials aren't shared from town to town, their NPCs don't interact, and it's just very siloed in an uncomfortable way. The game is also very grindy, in large part to paper over how mechanically simple it is and the lack of a stamina system. The player resource is, quite literally, time, and boy howdy are they determined to waste it. Yeah, I agree with everything you've said here. I kept playing it, and then I finally made it to a second town where they said "hey, stop working on THAT town, and come and do the exact same stuff over in THIS town" and knowing that there's a THIRD town out there which will do the same thing, I just stopped playing.
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Mar 23, 2023 21:42
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I was on the fence, but that avatar recommending it means I'll pick it up and try it out
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Mar 31, 2023 23:23
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Yeah, Volcano Princess is a pretty decent Princess Maker 2 clone. The three big things holding it back for me: the translation isn’t great, it’s not as bad as MTL, but it definitely wanders into “I think I get what you mean but I’m not sure” territory; it’s still buggy and I’ve had two CTDs in eight hours of play; and while it has mostly gotten rid of the creep factor included in PM2 it’s still not 100% gone- there are no “breast expansion pills”, no revealing outfits, no cabaret dancing, and most of all your relationship with her is 100% paternal, but she gets love letters from fans paying her to marry her, and one of the main jobs is working at the bathhouses which has some seedy options as a masseuse and private masseuse, and you can have her pursue marriage with some characters clearly in their middle age, but one could argue that you actually have to pursue those options and the game certainly doesn’t make you do them. In good ways it’s more streamlined game from PM2 - fewer skills and stats and no “lose this to gain that” options, dungeons are slay-the-spire forked encounter trees rather than open wandering. Also in good ways it’s more expansive - there are about eight same-age NPCs you can become closer friends with and maybe get to join you in dungeon runs if they like you. There are whole systems - horse raising and racing, the seedy underworld, major parts of the big plot- that I didn’t touch in my one run because there wasn’t time or because I was going down a different path. But I’d say it looks like there’s a lot of replayablity. Overall, thumbs up, will try another run to prove my daughter is actually a bird soon
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Apr 22, 2023 18:10
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I’ve picked it up and I’m enjoying it so far. The control scheme feels better than SV, and there are a lot more mini games instead of button presses, like you play a rhythm game for animal taming. It also puts seeds in their own bag and tools in their own slot so you don’t have to include them in managing your early, incredibly small inventory. The early game so far is pretty slow paced - you don’t buy seeds, you gather them from places the only spawn every few days, so there’s no “get yourself a million seeds and start planting ASAP to make $$$” pressure. Fishing is a simple minigame, and you get handed access to drying, smoking, and cooking food right away so you don’t have to survive on field onions for stamina. Really, my only complaint so far is that there are a LOT of clan members, and while their portraits are distinct the little 16-bit map/journal icons and their sprites are not distinctive enough, and they all have fake names like Grom and Bidu and I have no memory for weird names and so the “make friends” part of the game feels like it’ll suck for me. And with a few exceptions their personality is pretty much their job. Still only a few hours in, though.
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Apr 26, 2023 06:39
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Demiurge4 posted:Overall I enjoyed it and if I wasn’t a groggy power gamer I bet I would enjoy it a lot more. There’s tons of great details as the tribe settles into their new home and build communal areas. On that note I’ve been told Sunhaven is probably more my style so I’m going to check that out. Yeah, I'm the exact opposite, I bounced off of Sun Haven and I love Roots of Pacha (though I've only just started the second year). RoP is very Stardew Valley with a fresh coat of paint, like it's very clear they just lifted all of the SV mechanics and style as a starting point. From there, I think they made good improvements. They dropped the awkward/not-great combat and made the dungeon more puzzly*; they dropped the only penalties in the game (you no longer lose money for staying out too late, and with no combat, no combat loss worries); they added in neat new systems like getting better at specific crops, more types of animals, and more variety within each type of animal; they made the UI much better (useful screens now often have multiple tabs with moer information; maps give you live updates on where people are so that you can find them, and you can select a person to highlight where they are); and as the game progresses the village gets better and better as the community prospers. I feel like anyone who liked Stardew Valley and wants more of it will like Roots of Pacha. Sun Haven I felt was just trying to go too many different directions, and had way too much emphasis on needing to do everything. I got to the point where my farm was starting to get stable and be okay and the game said well, now here's a brand new land with a brand new farm you need to get up and running while maintaining the old farm and I just said 'gently caress this' and stopped playing, as it felt more like drudgery than accomplishment. Edit: *To be clear, nothing in the game is a serious challenge or hard. The challenge on dungeons is mostly remembering what's where and getting it all done before end of day forces you to stop.
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Apr 30, 2023 18:33
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Enfys posted:It's a style of game that I didn't know I wanted until I played Exocolonist for the first time (and then couldn't stop playing it). I immediately picked up Volcano Princess and really love this genre. Take a look at Ciel Fledge and Growing Up, too, as they're decent entries in the genre. I don't think either of them is as good as Exocolonist or VP, though.
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May 5, 2023 14:20
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The biggest thing in Graveyard Keeper is to look up all of the alchemy stuff on line. Trying to actually work your way through all the potential combinations, with the game providing you no help whatsoever, is just terrible. But I also agree that overall it's a grindy, unfriendly game where everyone is an rear end in a top hat (some of them funny assholes, most not). It's not a fun world to spend time in.
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Jun 29, 2023 03:34
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Bremen posted:Thanks for all the replies, I was definitely looking more for a one person homesteading style game than town management though. Raft is an interesting answer, I tend to think of it as more a survival and exploration game but I guess I can see how it meets the requirements. Medieval Dynasty *has* town management, but you don't have to bother with it. If you want to set up a barn and do your own farming and trade your goods with the local town to buy the stuff you need, you can absolutely do that. I don't know that you can get to some of the end-game stuff without the kind of infrastructure a town needs, like, it becomes very clear why subsistence farming as a lifestyle is kind of meagre, but you can still hunt and plant and raise animals and turn your house into something nicer. In theory, Wild West Dynasty might end up being more of what you want, but the reviews say it's just outright bad so far.
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Sep 17, 2023 06:03
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I've been enjoying Wildmender. There's a bit of jank and clearly-done-by-a-small-studioness to it, but it is overall really nice and the first farming game I've ever played that allowed full world deformation. I have maybe eight hours in and I'm only about a quarter through the plot, but I've been meandering while building a beautiful home garden. Really, my only complaint is that materials are hard to get, especially given how clearly you need walls everywhere.
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Sep 30, 2023 01:27
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Okay, so I’ve been playing a bunch of Coral Island, and I’m generally pretty meh on it. It clearly lifted a huge amount of its ideas directly from Stardew Valley and while that’s fine, so far I haven’t run into anything that actually makes Coral Island distinctive in gameplay. Maybe that opens up with diving and cleaning up the island, but so far it all feels very samey. My biggest problem with the game so far is that while they’ve included more characters, I’m having serious trouble noticing any personality whatsoever in them. They all seem to be vaguely upbeat, nice people with absolutely no real opinions or anything they care about, no quirks or style or distinct voice, and the art is hilariously female gaze where the women are all normal body shapes and the men are hottie hunks with stylized facial hair. None of this is bad, but absolutely none of it is compelling or interesting, either.
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Dec 2, 2023 16:47
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omg chael crash posted:I’m sorry but this is extremely compelling You don't have to be sorry about it; to each their own. I find the style amusing more than interesting.  AARD VARKMAN posted:Thanks I didn't realize there was a thread, also thanks for the tip, I didn't know I could get opals that way and that's going to be huge If you've rebuilt the bridge, you can also find Opals in the rocks south of the tracks, where the scorpions hang out. They blend in a bit, as they're ochre-colored rocks among red sand colored rocks, but they're in there. Issaries posted:Diving isn't that distinct either. You cut Yeah, it really feels less like it's own game than just a huge mod on top of SV, which isn't terrible, but it doesn't speak well to them to not have ideas on how to really make the game their own. Combined with the really dull villagers, and it just feels like they didn't have strong or solid ideas on what they wanted to do with this, which is weird for how focused it is on a non-Western setting.
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Dec 2, 2023 23:58
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Okay, so trip report after a fair bit of time in Coral Island, and overall I'm very meh on it. On the one hand: it does all of the Stardew Valley/Harvest Moon stuff, you build a farm and upgrade a house and have coops and barns and raise animals and save the town from a nefarious Evil Corporation that wants to move in. If you've played Stardew Valley to death and want to try something that has the same formula with some stuff modified so it feels new, this exists. On the other hand: when I say same fomula, I really mean the same formula. All the same mechanics as Stardew Valley - hoe ground, plant seeds, water ground, upgrade tools by going into a mine for four colors of ore (orange/white/yellow/purple, but here they're "bronze" "silver" "gold" and "osmium") which you take to a blacksmith and pay money and lose the tool for a day or two and now the watering covers 1x3 or 3x3 and the pickaxes knock out rocks in fewer hits and yadda yadda yadda. Sure, sure, it's the "formula" but when you get a broken english note in your mailbox telling you to come to a place in the woods where an animal is running a shop selling you hats and furniture based upon which achievements you've unlocked... it feels less like a "formula" and more like a "lift and shift". Then the festival has everyone contributing food to a communal stew where the important politician from some larger political body is showing up to judge the community on how it tastes based upon what you personally threw in. And there's a community board where people post requests for things you can grow or find. It makes a lot of it feel like a very extensive mod rather than a separate game. Now, it does have its own mechanics and direction - it has undersea diving and in theory an entire undersea town and community to meet, but the way you get to that town is by using your scythe to clear out trash the way you do grass on your farm, and that is the only thing you do and you have to do it a lot so I've only just gotten to the first cutscene where the merfolk are introduced as existing. And the Jumino-equivalent in this game seem to be a very Polynesian/Indonesian set of spirits who have their own thing going on, but again, you have to get halfway through the 160 levels of the mines before they actually start doing things. And the mines are boring in a very literal sense because they've copied the mines from Stardew Valley except they've reduced the number of enemies to about 4 per level and massively reduced the "break the right rock to find the hole to the next level" or just increased the number of rocks or both because you'll be lucky to get through 15 levels of the mines on a full day, and that day is spent clicking a lot of loving rocks to break them. The thing that really kills me, though, is just how bland and poor the writing is. The only characters that come across as having distinct personalities are the people who are clearly jerks; 75% of the characters are just very undefined nice people who don't really have opinions or direction and just ask the player a lot of questions or comment on the farm so that there's nothing they reveal about themselves. There's a lot to criticize about Stardew Valley's writing, but the characters in it at least felt fleshed out and distinct in a way that these characters don't. I have no idea what Coral Island is trying to say about its characters. There was a "friendship" cutscene I had with the mayor where I saw him carrying a box in the rain, I offered to help, he gave it to me, he opened an umbrella over us both, he thanked me for helping, and then the scene was over. I've seen two cutscenes where the last person to speak says some half-joke and then everyone around them laughs as the camera rolls upwards. These scenes seem like a lot of work to set up, and it's just weird how uninteresting and slightly disconnected they are! Anyways. If you're the type of Stardew Valley player who never interacts with the town, it's probably fine. Otherwise, I really think this game is just not worth it, and you should look at Roots of Pacha if you need a Stardew-Valley-but-different game.
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Dec 6, 2023 05:47
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Megazver posted:Thanks for writing this up! I think I'll maybe try it when it's in a bundle. I absolutely will not, because I enjoyed it as a precursor!  Yeah, the complete contrast between the well-written, distinctive, interesting, and changing characters in Sandrock is just an absolute turnaround from the bland "please project your wants onto this blank romance template" characters of Coral Island and maybe I'd be overall happier if I'd done them in the other order, but at least I still have Spirittea to jump into, and all buzz about that one is good. But thank you for the recommendation, I do very much appreciate it!
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Dec 6, 2023 13:36
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The Lone Badger posted:Long Live the Princess in s a non-chill Princess Maker / stat-raising game. Your major goal is just to survive. I kind of disagree. Long Live The Queen looks like a Princess Maker type, but it’s much more of a puzzle game. LLTQ has one path through it, and all of the choices are about trial-and-erroring the solution to this week’s crisis. PM-likes are much more about deciding what kind of person you want to raise/be, and finding your way forward through open choices.
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Jan 11, 2024 18:44
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I wrote the below a while back. It’s missing Volcano Princess and Chinese Parents of games I’ve tried; I’ll try to write something on that tonight.skeleton warrior posted:Thank you for starting this thread, Arsenic!
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Jan 13, 2024 01:05
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What do you love about DQB2? If it’s a high level of building/control options and some level of “make people happy and put them to work” you may want to look more at survival building games like PalWorld and Age of Conan
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Jan 25, 2024 19:54
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Yeah, all of the Story of Seasons Harvest Moon games and all of the Rune Factories seem to be 50% off on Steam. Has anyone broken down which of the modern HM games/ports are actually fun?
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Feb 19, 2024 20:48
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The Witch of Fern Island just came out. It wants to be a Stardew Valley/Sandrock with magic, but it's kind of hindered by a stiff translation, poor optimization (runs much worse than Sandrock without doing anything better), and just really marginal 3D graphics. Like, I don't think any of the female characters have eyebrows, that level of marginal graphics. Haven't yet hit two hours in it. We'll see if they do any updates this week; if not, I'm probably sending it back given that SV is about to drop a new version with new stuff.
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Mar 1, 2024 02:36
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I found Roots of Pacha very fun, and I thought it actually improved on Stardew Valley with better and more interesting mechanics. YMMV apparently.
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Mar 16, 2024 11:30
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HopperUK posted:I have an eye on 'Before the Green Moon' and 'Echoes of the Plum Grove'. I've put a couple hours into Echoes of the Plum Grove, and it's decent. It's a little more hard-core than other farming games: you actually have to feed yourself regularly, and all of the crops/fish/foragables decay on a realistic timeframe, so you can't just survive off of a stack of 20 fish you ground out one Saturday two weeks prior. And also profits are pretty crappy on basic goods, so it feels very subsistence at the start. The townsfolk seem pretty generic, though that also seems to be because the game expects you to play through generations, and so eventually the town will be NPCs randomly generated after all of the starting NPCs have died off. Personality traits seem to be more of a descriptor in the logbook than anything that comes through in conversation. Also, I have a lot of trouble telling any of them apart due to them all having happy blobby faces and I can't really tell and remember that Sarah has a triangle nose and a white kerchief while Amanda has a circle nose and a pink kerchief. But it's still interesting! I've barely scratched the main plot so I couldn't even begin to tell you what's going on but there's a lot of muttering about the King's taxes but also there's a witch so I have no idea what's going to happen.
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May 1, 2024 04:11
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Okay, so I’ve put a dozen hours more into Echoes of the Plum Grove, and… eh. It’s not bad, but it sure as hell isn’t good. So, at heart, it’s a legacy survival farming game. You have to sleep enough and you have to eat enough to get through the year, and after a couple of in-game years you get old and then a little later you die and pass the farm down to another family member. There’s nothing wrong with either of those concepts, and at least the accelerated timeline keeps it from falling into Kynseed’s trap where you’ve done everything before you’re done with your first character. Crops rot pretty quickly (given the whole pre-refrigeration setting), so no throwing turnips in a chest and keeping them just fine there for years. But the survival elements are more *grindy* than interesting. You need to sleep enough, which just limits how much farm you can actually care about, and you need to eat, which just means choosing which crops are set aside for that rather than selling, but there’s not much danger, because foragables are loving everywhere and replenish every day, and if you don’t like that, everyone is always offering quests all the time which are easy to solve and reward you in good food, and if you don’t like that, wood is an incredibly expensive resource you can find everywhere and trade for food. You have to actively ignore what the game is pushing at you to not eat like a king. Instead, the game goes in weird directions in terms of what it actually makes hard. Farming is slow because the controls aren’t always responsive, sometimes the game wants you to interact with the farthest away part of an object, and worst of all, you can only water one space at a time no matter how much you invest in your watering can. Also, you can only buy a few seeds a day and you have to learn in game which characters sell those seeds. Storage space is limited, but you very quickly skill up so that you’re getting three different levels of crops or forage which of course makes the limited storage space even worse, and when it comes to building lots of extra storage, again, wood is one of the most valuable resources. Also, everyone has money, and everyone buys everything for the same price, so making money is boring and straightforward, just find people and push turnips on them. Technically there’s a Market Day event but it just means the merchants you usually have to walk across town to get to are now all in the same location. Feeding yourself is pretty easy, but actually cooking things is really hard because all recipes are extremely specific (you cannot even think about cooking Salmon if you don’t have lemon and cream for sauce!) and most of them require animal goods or crops from different seasons which means you can’t make them until after you’ve become successful enough to own a barn and an icebox. Also, the legacy/survival aspect of the game hurts it in another way, which is the NPCs. Because they all get older and die, too, they’re designed to be generic and with random traits pasted on but they’re not written well enough for those traits to make them interesting or distinctive. It doesn’t help that the cutesy art style they’re all drawn in has variations only in the shape of the small nose, and about 60% of the clothes and hairstyles are interchangeable enough that about half the people on the island are indistinguishable from each other. There’s a main plot. It’s not interesting enough to comment on; it’s your standard “do your Stardew Valley bundles” except rather than specific objects to force you to encounter all elements of the game, it’s a huge number of high-quality objects so that you have to grind a bunch. There’s an entire magic system to go along with that, but said system requires you to walk to the complete opposite end of the island to interact with it and so I just could not be bothered. Maybe once I have a family that will run the farm for me, but right now it’s just me watering a hundred crops one square at a time. If you want a zen podcast-listening game where stuff doesn’t really happen but you can chill and slowly turn a wild field into a farm, this is probably a good game for you. If you want an engaging, interesting setting or compelling mechanics to be solved, this is not it.
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May 7, 2024 00:52
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