|
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1599330/Wildmender/ Wildmender is a game I picked up the day before yesterday and have not yet been able to put down. It's quite hard to categorize but fundamentally it's a game about exploring a world, collecting plants, and using those plants to rebuild a green landscape from a desert. You start out in said desert, with a small spring of water and some basic desert adapted plants, and as you explore the world you will find more types of seeds which you can bring home. You can plant them and grow them into various kinds of plant in a freeform manner, and in so doing you will steadily improve the soil quality to help more types of plants grow, which can be harvested for useful materials which can be used to make food and equipment to help you explore further.  The game has a plot which will require you to travel to different environments and overcome combat and navigation challenges, the world in general is quite hostile simply because water is very scarce and the terrain is quite rough, but your character can climb vertical surfaces and you will get more movement abilities as you complete the story. Traversal I think is probably quite a lot like Breath of the Wild in terms of what your character can do. Combat is hard to describe but it's fairly simple, different enemies have different attacks and patterns and the game telegraphs what they're going to do with big highlights on the ground so it's clear what you need to do to survive, but when it throws a lot of different attacks at you at once it is still pretty engaging.  The real appeal, I think, is the garden building system. Plants all have different needs and want different environments. The game tracks things like different soil types, water levels, humidity of the air, direct sunlight, and the physical environment around the plant. Some plants need to be planted next to other plants to support them such as root fungus and vines, trees will block the sun and provide shade which some plants prefer while others will fare better in open fields. Roots and vines of plants will conform to surfaces surrounding the plant (this looks legit cool with the vines if you plant them up against interesting geometry)  Happy plants generate "essence" which is basically a magic currency and can be used to perform a number of actions such as boosting growth of plants and later, directly changing their cultivar type, of which there are a number. Putting plants together in close proximity can produce new cultivars so there's some experimentation you can do. The game also has deformable terrain and a water simulation, water flows downhill and pools if in sufficient quantity. It's a little bit clunky visually but works well enough and means that how you run the water from your springs is quite important. You can also place new springs to a limite degree so you can set up your own waterfalls and watercourses if you want to, depending on the terrain.  Once you have a favourable environment, plants will propagate themselves too, which can be a little annoying as your garden can get quite overgrown if you don't prune it occasionally, but it means that an established environment will slowly encroach on the desert, provided you can supply it with water. Honestly I really like the game, super chill but also interesting to play. Also it has a random map generator would you believe, which seems to produce maps that are just as good as the one it comes with, in fact I suspect that might just be a random map that was pre-generated. But given the effects that spring placement and topology have on water flow it would make for some interesting replayability I think if you really gel with the garden building.  E: oh and I forgot it has co-op multiplayer if that's your thing. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Oct 2, 2023 |
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 13:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 15:41 |
|
|
This seems neat, is there any time pressure or a story that you're trying to finish or is it mostly about exploring and expanding your garden?
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 13:45
|
|
|
Tell me more about the frog.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 13:47
|
|
|
I just hopped into this yesterday based on a mention in the Steam thread, and yeah it's indeed a fun chill time. One of my favourite aspects about gatherering/building games like this is seeing how you end up changing the world around you, and this is basically 100% just that vibe.explosivo posted:This seems neat, is there any time pressure or a story that you're trying to finish or is it mostly about exploring and expanding your garden? There is an overarching story about finding and reviving various elemental gods to help you revive the land (and give you new abilities in the process), but there doesn't seem to be any overall time pressure. The only timed effects are a hunger/thirst gauge, and occasional attacks on your home spring by evil wraiths. But the nice thing is that you can customize or outright disable these effects to your liking: 
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 13:53
|
|
|
K8.0 posted:Tell me more about the frog. The frog, believe it or not, is essentially a garbage collector. Once you find one you can bring him to your spring and he will hop around eating anything on the floor (plants drop seeds if you don't pick them) and you can open his mouth and grab stuff out of him, or it just disappears after a while.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 14:05
|
|
|
I bought the desert gardening game, will report back once i am able to put some time into it later!
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 14:42
|
|
|
This looks really fun. Does it have any kind of multiplayer because it is absolutely the type of game I'd want to coop with a buddy or two
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 14:53
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:The frog, believe it or not, is essentially a garbage collector. Once you find one you can bring him to your spring and he will hop around eating anything on the floor (plants drop seeds if you don't pick them) and you can open his mouth and grab stuff out of him, or it just disappears after a while. Dope what a good frog
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 14:58
|
|
|
Fajita Queen posted:This looks really fun. Does it have any kind of multiplayer because it is absolutely the type of game I'd want to coop with a buddy or two It does have co-op, yes.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 15:08
|
|
|
Fajita Queen posted:This looks really fun. Does it have any kind of multiplayer because it is absolutely the type of game I'd want to coop with a buddy or two Oh yeah it has coop, I forgot to add that.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 15:16
|
|
|
oh hell yes
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 16:46
|
|
|
I have been entirely blown away by how good this game is. It's everything I never knew I wanted in a game. I feel like farming and survival and management games have a narrative of conquering your environment. This is also a game about changing the environment to make your life easier, but it's about restoring the environment. There was some gimmicky puzzle game a while back that tried to be all about that, but for me it completely missed the visceral satisfaction of feeling how much better it was to have things restored, other than the aesthetics. This game really makes it feel like a functioning ecosystem is vital for human survival. And it wouldn't be very good at that if it weren't also incredibly fun and satisfying as a game. Fajita Queen posted:This looks really fun. Does it have any kind of multiplayer because it is absolutely the type of game I'd want to coop with a buddy or two We've played coop survival games and coop management games before, but they've never really clicked like this one. Exploration is challenging and rewarding and feeds back in to your oasis-tending, which in turn supports further adventures. As an example you might come across a desiccated salt flat that saps your thirst even harder than the desert usually does but eventually you find and grow seeds back at your oasis that give you berries that give you water when you eat them, in contrast to the earlier foods that made you thirsty while you ate. I'm spoiling that because a lot of the fun of a first play through is that nothing is clearly laid out. You'll get hints and cryptic messages from ghosts, but there's a lot of fun to be had just exploring and seeing what things do. I haven't had to look at a wiki once during this game, though my friend had to look up how to expand storage baskets (there's a "craft" button below the items in the basket that we missed). In two days we racked up 12 hours of play time, entirely in coop. I could spend hours just puttering about, tending the trees and plants in our oasis, while my friend braved the wilderness bringing back exotic seeds from distant lands. One thing I'd note is the start can be challenging. Which for us, was fun. Maybe the start is better tuned for single player, but we did not grow enough food to support two people. We were relying too much on natural resources that only grew close to the starting area. We were forced to set out into the wastes to find something to eat while our first plants came in, dangerously hungry the whole time. Eventually we found the ruins of an ancient house with two perfectly preserved ancient festival cakes that were rather dry but incredibly filling. I'll never forget the elation we had at the shocking and unanticipated discovery of cakes to save us from starvation. I'm glad the game didn't continue to be that hard, but it provided a very strong focus to expand the oasis and explore the world. It was clear that we would die if we did not. But we were never again in direct danger of dying to hunger, once we put the appropriate emphasis on managing it. (Thirst and more overtly hostile environments were still a challenge though!) The game is also amazingly polished, but nevertheless we did run into one frustrating bug that you might want to be aware of. If you pick up a whole plant it goes into a pack on your back, rather than your regular inventory. A couple times, I think after fast traveling, the plant my friend was carrying disappeared for them, but I could still see it. Since there was something in their pack they couldn't pick up and move anything, but they also couldn't put it down since their own game didn't realize anything was there. After trying a bunch of stuff like reloading we eventually figured out you gotta kill yourself in that situation, so you drop everything, including what was on your back. But that's the only bug we encountered in 12 hours of play. This is a very well polished game overall. Oh, and you can freely change all the colors of all the outfits at any time. It is a very cute and satisfying dressup game.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 17:06
|
|
|
Holy crap the reward from the canyons is loving incredible, just level entire patches of terrain, dig trenches, build walls, whatever you want. You can legit just draw out shapes and have the game terraform the land to them, it's awesome. In general, the scale of what you end up doing in this is way bigger than you might expect. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Oct 2, 2023 |
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 17:32
|
|
|
How does it run on the steam deck. This is my important metric for making a purchase.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 18:16
|
|
|
Is green-ifying the desert a big part of the game? Like in that second picture, are you eventually likely to have a trail of green from place to place or do you just end up with patches around springs? I'm thinking here of an old minecraft modcraft called Blightfall where the world had been taken over by basically zerg creep and you had to slowly reclaim and terraform it into something usable. I really enjoyed slowly seeing the world turn into something more pleasant and less hostile and I've always regretted that pack didn't get updated.MarcusSA posted:How does it run on the steam deck. Also this.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 19:19
|
|
|
I noticed the wraith raids spawn around you, not your oasis at least in single-player. So don't feel like you have to dick around at home waiting for it! I found out because I got bored waiting for the raid to finally start and ported to a grave to make the offering before some fruit for it spoils (and night was about to end, too!) and the raid hit me before i could make it back. Oh, and the game won't let you double up on trinkets. I merely lost out on 3 wood for another inventory ring finding this out so no biggie.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 19:20
|
|
|
Bremen posted:Is green-ifying the desert a big part of the game? Like in that second picture, are you eventually likely to have a trail of green from place to place or do you just end up with patches around springs? I'm thinking here of an old minecraft modcraft called Blightfall where the world had been taken over by basically zerg creep and you had to slowly reclaim and terraform it into something usable. I really enjoyed slowly seeing the world turn into something more pleasant and less hostile and I've always regretted that pack didn't get updated. As I said, your plants will spread themselves and carpet the desert in green slowly over time, provided you can sort out the water situation. I think that if you hit a critical mass of plants, they start to affect the humidity of the air and then subsequent plants will kind of water themselves? But I'm not quite sure how humidity works. I have some humid areas but they aren't ones I've built myself so I'm not sure exactly what affects it. It does seem like clusters of foliage do better at it but I haven't naturally been able to raise it very high yet. As you go through the story you will eventually get the ability to turn big chunks of dead foliage alive and green again so basically yes I think you can paint a lot of the map green if you want to.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 19:23
|
|
|
Bremen posted:Is green-ifying the desert a big part of the game? Like in that second picture, are you eventually likely to have a trail of green from place to place or do you just end up with patches around springs? I'm thinking here of an old minecraft modcraft called Blightfall where the world had been taken over by basically zerg creep and you had to slowly reclaim and terraform it into something usable. I really enjoyed slowly seeing the world turn into something more pleasant and less hostile and I've always regretted that pack didn't get updated. Last Transmission posted:I noticed the wraith raids spawn around you, not your oasis at least in single-player. I guess it wasn't that I was in a hostile area but that that was the raid! It's weird- a couple times a raid has gone on and on without ending. I assume because some guy got stuck in a rock somewhere or something. But one time, when I went to check on an outlying spring, it was being attacked by a wraith. A never ending raid where the last enemy doesn't show up is actually the worst bug I've found so far, so that's not too bad.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 19:30
|
|
|
Bremen posted:Is green-ifying the desert a big part of the game? Like in that second picture, are you eventually likely to have a trail of green from place to place or do you just end up with patches around springs? I'm thinking here of an old minecraft modcraft called Blightfall where the world had been taken over by basically zerg creep and you had to slowly reclaim and terraform it into something usable. I really enjoyed slowly seeing the world turn into something more pleasant and less hostile and I've always regretted that pack didn't get updated. I do get a similar feel to Blightfall from this game, although I think an even better minecraft modpack comparison is Regrowth. I spent like an hour digging a connection between my main oasis and a nearby spring that I cleared. When the waters from the 2 mingled, I was immensely satisfied.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 19:37
|
|
|
 Giant Oracle Tree got that dumptruck root system.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 20:07
|
|
|
Hello fellow Blightfall enjoyers This does feel conceptually kinda similar which is cool
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 21:23
|
|
|
MarcusSA posted:How does it run on the steam deck. Playing on deck without touching the settings. The fan is spinning the entire time but I have the old style fan curve switched on so it might just be that. Game seems to run fine. Looks good. Controller controls are great. Maybe a few stutters etc but I haven’t felt the need to touch the settings or open the performance monitor and start fiddling at all. I think I will like this game a lot. It ticks a lot of my boxes and it is a gardening game! Maybe they can do a critter dlc and we can have viva piñata back! That is the game it feels closest too so far honestly.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 22:29
|
|
|
LeFishy posted:Playing on deck without touching the settings. The fan is spinning the entire time but I have the old style fan curve switched on so it might just be that. Thanks! I’ve added it to my wishlist for later!
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2023 22:30
|
|
|
Oh dang, I would certainly recommend making a point of searching out a couple of arcane ghosts early on. Those don't seem to be quite as common as the others to stumble across, and a number of pretty important upgrades are in the tree (notable, improved mirror and bottle).
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 00:28
|
|
|
If you want to get into gardening I would also suggest aiming for symbiosis, it lets you make the root sigil which spreads water between all plants in a wide area, vastly increasing your growable area away from watercourses.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 00:36
|
|
|
This is pretty neat so far! A bit more taxing on the PC than I expected, I played on my tv in 4k and it got all the fans going in my PC.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 01:45
|
|
|
Yeah I get a bit bad performance too sometimes, hopefully that will be improved over time but my PC is quite old.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 01:46
|
|
|
I’ve seen this come up in a review and in my own gameplay: It’s incredibly easy to miss tutorial messages/dialog in this game. Which can leave you missing concepts. My basic suggestion: don’t ‘talk’ to things unless you have to. It’s easy to miss dialogue when you do. I’m not aware of any in or out of game way to review these messages at the moment though I haven’t tried too hard, since it’s early enough for a restart. The help menu option launches a webpage with classic troubleshooting stuff like drivers, not gameplay elements. There should be steam guides soon enough but a simple warning should help avoid missed text Edit: correction. It's not the menus/talk/interaction that's not the problem. It's just the dialog text auto-advances whether you're looking at it or not, and the little dingle telling you about a message is easily overlooked when you're glancing at a corner or info screen. LordSloth fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Oct 3, 2023 |
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 03:06
|
|
|
This is pretty fun so far, its mostly chill, but some of the bigger encounters can be decently intense. Only complaint I have is the digging feels clumsy, its a little more awkward then I'd like on extending the spring.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 04:59
|
|
|
LordSloth posted:I’ve seen this come up in a review and in my own gameplay:
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 05:46
|
|
|
I am doing landscaping and hydro modifications that would make an Arizona golf course owner blush So I don't know about greening the *entire* map, it's a big map; and honestly, greening the last two thirds of Blightfall seemed to be "set up a bunch of stuff, sit in your base and watch numbers tick up". But it's pretty easy to spread meadow in a local area very fast, as once you have access to it you start getting plants that spread it naturally. Honestly, I'm a little worried it's spreading *too* fast - "meadow" is an aspect of a plant, and I want don't want making hybrids to get screwed up because they all naturally turn into meadow plants by being in meadows. Maybe that's what the planters are for? Anyways, I've got 30 hours in, I'm loving it, and I'm like 10 hours on a new save because I made a lot of mistakes with the first run and I decided a new start was better and I feel like I was right. I think the biggest risk in this game is growing *too* much, you really only need three or four of each plant to produce what you need (though six or eight food plants early is good) and I'm so used to Stardew Valley and other farm games where more early stuff gets you rolling faster that I spent my first save laying in way too many plants, and the garden became just an overgrown mess with three full-time enchanted frogs still choking on the stupid backlog of crap I didn't care about, with a whole back field of plants I laid in because "they're meadow, I won't need to water them much" and they just became a time sink. New garden is more organized, more spread out, and I've embraced the idea that I'm bringing water everywhere. Besides, irrigation ditches are the best defense against dust devils. (Okay, technically, not having any desert in a mile radius is actually the best defense, but that's later) Edit: LeFishy posted:I think I will like this game a lot. It ticks a lot of my boxes and it is a gardening game! Maybe they can do a critter dlc and we can have viva piñata back! That is the game it feels closest too so far honestly. That is exactly the comparison I was thinking of. It's very Viva Pinata, just cool and relaxing instead of bright and funny.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 06:19
|
|
|
Only "common" varieties of plants will morph based on biome, biome type plants are not a variety in and of themselves but simply what you get when a common cultivar is present in a biome.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 08:20
|
|
|
I also really really like that you can just pick up and relocate just about everything ever. Much like many people here, my first garden was a huge mess, but it turned out to be super easy to just pick up the fully grown plants and spread them out a little. It's still not exactly orderly, but now at least I can navigate through it without getting turned around 
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 09:55
|
|
|
Oh yeah basically anything smaller than a tree you can shift.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 10:33
|
|
|
Oh hello this is absolutely my jam. Hello blightfall/regrowth enjoyers, it's nice to see you here
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 14:09
|
|
|
did someone say blightfall
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 14:43
|
|
|
Bremen posted:Is green-ifying the desert a big part of the game? Like in that second picture, are you eventually likely to have a trail of green from place to place or do you just end up with patches around springs? I'm thinking here of an old minecraft modcraft called Blightfall where the world had been taken over by basically zerg creep and you had to slowly reclaim and terraform it into something usable. I really enjoyed slowly seeing the world turn into something more pleasant and less hostile and I've always regretted that pack didn't get updated. https://www.technicpack.net/modpack/blightfall.592618/updates quote:Blightfall was updated to version 3.0.7-CE 6 months ago Was looking for blightfall videos when I stumbled across this five month old video that let me know it was still being updated, so credit to this tuber for the info and whoever is actually updating the code. The community edition hit about eight months ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_PvImC1ASc
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 19:02
|
|
|
I too absolutely love “map changing as progression” and even though this game is a little ‘lighter’ than my usual boring sim and management favorites, I am really digging it. Making the desert green rules.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 19:34
|
|
|
I'm just past what amounts to the tutorial and I think this one's a winner. I do wonder whether it's going to get much deeper or more complex, but as it stands I'd be pretty happy with the experience if it's just "this, and 10x more of it" Very chill, great music and atmosphere. I turned down the difficulty some because while I don't want it to be completely trivial, it's not what I'm here for. also turned the fall damage way down and am considering turning it off because I am really not in the mood to manually climb down from hills that I already spent the time climbing up Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Oct 3, 2023 |
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 19:36
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 15:41 |
|
|
MarcusSA posted:How does it run on the steam deck.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2023 20:00
|
|
