Besmirch

Great game, responsive dev. As most reviews would tell you the visuals are very much reminiscent of Faith The Unholy Trinity. The gameplay has a solid foundation, farming sim kinda like stardew valley with some horror survival elements, including managing the food for the village. While still needing obvious work it's a game that I see no reason to support if you regularly put your faith in EA or support indie devs. If you don't I'd give it a follow and maybe even a wishlist if you like what you see. Easily worth the current price but I'll be updating the review later on, specially on release.

Playing on a Legion GO, which works pretty well. I'm on day 10 and have mixed feelings about the game. I'm fairly close to calling it quits, I might give it 1 or 2 more days. First I'll cover what I like. The overall NES horror aesthetic and music is top notch. I didn't even realize I needed this but it's great. The game also seems like it could be fairly deep for a Stardew Valley type game, but I haven't gotten super far into it to know for sure. What I don't like. It feels overwhelming and stressful. Right out of the gate you're hit with multiple time based objectives. You've got a town to feed and they aren't going to feed themselves. You do this initially by planting and growing beets, but if you sell enough beets to actually get some money to buy some more seeds, your villagers start going hungry. And if you use all your beets on your villagers to keep them fed, you don't make any money to buy more seeds. So you try to appease both sides, but by day 10 I haven't made much progress on either end, it feels like I'm just barely keeping my head above water. There's also a loan that you must repay and they start wanting to collect a fairly significant sum of cash by day 10. You get bulletin board quests that give you 3 days to complete them but the days seem to come and go in a blur and you barely have time to even look for the stuff to complete the quest after tilling the ground, planting seeds, watering them, and exploring a little. Story line wise, the religious folk of the town are talking about an impending horrific event that you need to prepare for. How can I prepare for that when I can barely keep myself fed and barely keep the town fed and try to scrape a few coins together on the way? I'm not opposed to stressful games, but when there's time limits involved it somehow saps the fun. A little slower beginning would be much appreciated, to let me get some footing before taking on the world. The low-fi aesthetic also makes things a little confusing. At times it's hard to tell what something is, until you choose the right tool to interact with it. The UI could use some work. When speaking to a villager I often don't know who it is I'm speaking to, because their chat bubble doesn't have a name attached. When I tried to cook food for the first time, you play a little mini game to determine if you burn the food, cook it perfectly or just cook it "OK". Burned quite a few precious beets just trying to figure out how to play the mini game correctly. Overall I think the game shows a lot of promise, and I haven't quite given up on it yet, but I'm close. I play for an hour and then just don't feel like playing anymore because of all the timed pressures the game is throwing at me. Will update my review and change to positive if the game ever "hooks" me, but right now it kinda feels like a chore to play it so I can't recommend.