A Game About Chopping Trees

If you've run out of cozy games to play, or just enjoy supporting shorter, messier, but still cozy experiences, you're likely good to go for this game. As a fellow cozy games addict, I think this scratches the itch on a surface level. However, this is one of those cozy games that fall short of being truly satisfying. It also leaves much to be desired in general performance. Pros: - The overall color palette of the game is pleasant and cozy. - Contains 3-ish solid hours of tree cutting rote gameplay which is decently cozy. Cons: - Gameplay: To give credit where it's due, this could've been another "stare and hold a button" failure of a cozy game. It's not: the simple addition of actually having to pick up logs and take them back to get cut up, and the addition of mine carts to help past the first area, makes the gameplay feel a bit fuller. However, the inventor design at the bottom implies complexity you won't find: you get an axe and later a chainsaw, but once you get the later there's no reason for the former. Why keep the axe as an inventory item? The stamina system needed a lot more workshopping to make feel satisfying to manage or upgrade. You run out and must either go back to a cabin to replenish it (which you pay for at the upgrade table, and that's not very intuitive), or buy coffee to replenish. But you might as well run back to the cabin every time, because the coffee is an item which you need to hold a button for the character to take slow partial sips of, slowly replenishing your stamina by small chunks. It's nice in a pinch, but even the initial "uncork the thermos and drink" animation is unnecessarily slow. It could also use better feedback in general when it comes to completing goals. There's a section of broken beehives you can fix in the second section, with no meaningful feedback when you do other than "3d model changes from broken to fixed". Everything feels kind of poorly thought-out. - Performance: Poorly optimized, heavy drops in fps, specially if you're using the cart, seems to get worse when you have a bunch of physics objects rolling around (which you'll have a lot of if you try cutting several trees at once, so you better pack em up to the saw quickly). - Buggy?: You'll want to be very careful with the angle you're cutting trees on. Yes, to some degree, choosing not to cut the tree in the direction of a body of water is common sense. But even if you try to cut them towards what should be a solid wall to make sure they don't roll away, log sections can get trapped inside the wall geometry and be impossible to pick up. I've seen other negative reviews regarding this issue, so I know I'm not the only one experiencing it. The only solution is to reload a save, which I hope was neither so long ago it becomes frustrating, nor accidentally PAST the point the log got stuck, cuz you're out of luck then. - Length: Short. This game is barely 3 hours long to complete three choppable wooden areas. There's also a distinct feeling of "they paid a bit more love and attention to the first area than the rest, huh?", as the third area is pretty barren with no points of interest to interact with. The first two areas had one or two of these, which isn't much, but it did make the third section feel very dull. - Upgrades: A lot of so-so "cozy" games struggle a lot with these. Upgrades that seem poorly thought-out and worse in pacing, You can chose to upgrade different things, such as your tool, your stamina, the mine carts, etc -- but if you're not committing to one, you're making sure you'll only upgrade a full branch until the third section of the map. "Stamina" in particular is terrible, with the very last upgrade being an actual regeneration option. Perhaps it should've always regenerated, with upgrades making it do so faster? The other branches are similar, not feeling meaningful enough until some of the last upgrades, at which point you're once more at the third area already and almost done. The game rewards you for completing all areas and turning on a lighthouse by immediately jumping you into "New Game+", and even THAT feels sloppy. It teleports your character to the starting area, but not the mine carts (which stay wherever you left them), and whatever pile of logs you left getting cut are still slowly getting cut. Your rewards is ALL trees getting restored, but you keep your upgrades and all the paths you opened. Unless you're obsessed with some aspect of the game at this point, it does not seem worth it to play any further. All in all, I played it, got the most basic of cozy enjoyments out of it while listening to a podcast, but cannot really recommend it to anyone else.