Crest - an indirect god sim

Eat Create Sleep Studio is closing down ! Possible of Removal of this Game https://steamcommunity.com/app/1096090/eventcomments/591759268792830008?snr=1_5_9_ [quote] ... This means Shallow Waters or any ECS games will not happen ... ... Our games will be online for now, but we don't know for how long ... [/quote] Get it while you can.

The game is really frustratng on normal settings. Your followers can feel suicidale when it comes to breeding and eating. There is a lot of rng that can mess you up such as; food sources dwindling, cities having policies that oppose one and another making it impossible to please everybody, cities having policies that oppose having children or even eating food, followers moving to cities with the worst policy, hippos spawning right next to your first city and much more. The biggest hurdle in this game is how knowledge works. You need to unlock words and boons to aid your followers in not driving themself to extinction. The problem is that each time you make a new world, the objectives will change and not at all reflect your starting position. How am I suppoed to be able to found three new cities along the coast, when I lack the means to sustaine my first city due to piss poor starting location or even means to unlock the word coast cause I don't have any achivable objectives in reach? You can overcome these things with experince, but is very frustrating to reach that point. Is not fun playing this game for hours only to lose cause your remaning followers decide to at random kill eachother (not even go to war or cannabalize, straigth up kill followers in the same city for no reason) or that they really don't need to have children.

It's been a while since I've had Crest installed, and to be honest, it has just sort of been sitting in my library for years... There's something very cool about the game that I can't quite put my finger on - maybe the highly stylistic art, maybe the novel approach to the "god game" genre, or just the bare concept of language being the guiding force behind civilization... But unfortunately it doesn't quite come together. It's a little too hard to be fun, or maybe I'm just an incompetent god, and the ability to upgrade plateaus rather early, so if you're not good at the core mechanics, you're just not going to do well. There are some obviously winning decisions to make, and it winds up feeling sort of forced to try to diversify your strategy in play. The art is SO stylistic. Some really bold decisions have been made, and I really admire that a lot. At the end of the day, though, I need my little meeples to look more like actual people. I need big bold colors and clear, sans-serif fonts, and a predictable, easy-to-read UI. I can't recommend it outright, but if you've been looking at it in the store for a few months, curious to see what's on offer, then maybe give it a try for half an hour to see if it clicks for you. It's not bad even as just a "collectors' item" to support a creative attempt.

A great concept poorly done. The only action you can take is to give commands. To give commands you need to unlock Words. To unlock words you need Wisdom. To get Wisdom you have to complete random objectives. How do you complete objectives? By giving commands. For a god sim, you really are railroaded into doing whatever your objectives tell you to do. I've played just under 3 hours, and that's as much as I can take from this game. It's not even engaging enough to be frustrating. It's just boring. It's a game where you sit and watch, and once in a while give a command and see what random thing results. I like the idea of playing a god and having so much power, yet so much being outside your control with your followers misinterpreting your commands and nature slowly getting out of balance. But it doesn't feel like a god sim. It feels like a very slow puzzle game. I just couldn't get invested. If you are on the fence with this game, don't get it. Watch a let's play of it and you've pretty much had the same experience as playing it.

This game, while fun while it lasts, is over too quickly for my taste, also for the cost. It's fun to play god games, indirectly influencing a world. 'member Populous? Some tasks seem almost impossible, and you can't even try to achieve them directly. So it can get rather frustrating. It depends on your need for a challenging game whether you will like to take on this challenge. I've played it now for 5 hours and it's over. That's not a game, that's an episode. Let's see if new eras come in further updates, so that people can play further after the current one is over.

Great game so far, but very limited in it's mechanics. This was well worth the sale price of $4.36 CAD, however it only took about 3.5 hours until I mastered the mechanics. I'd love to see my people evolve further, and eventually become self sufficient to the point where they could colonise other planets and I could just sit back and watch. If you enjoy the type of God-Sim where you micro-manage everything, you'll hate this game. If you love watching what you've built play out, and occasionally give a guiding hand than this game if def for you.

I gave it a few tries but just couldn't get into it

Giving this a thumbs down is not what I wanted to do. It's a really cool concept with some real potential, but unfortunately the execution just misses the mark. The big problem here is that for a game that claims to be a directionless god sim/story generator, it very much forces you to complete the "quests" in the early game. The reason for this is that those quests are the only way to unlock new words and the order in which those words can be unlocked is at least somewhat random. This leads to a situation where if you unlock the "wrong" words, you can theoretically end up being prevented from unlocking more words or at least having to rely on the random number generator to fulfill the quest and give you some points. Again, I hate to give this game a thumbs down. It's got some really cool ideas and the mid/late game is somewhat interesting, but for me the early game just isn't fun so I can't recommend it.