First of all, I really liked the game, and my negative review is precisely because I liked it, but I'm frustrated by its many shortcomings.
All the game mechanics are poorly explained, if at all. They are also incomplete and broken at first, but they soon receive a patch that makes them tedious again.
Some games require the use of the wiki to fully enjoy them. In Elin, even with the entire wiki shoved up your ass, you won't grasp the gameflow.
Not only because the game has numerous luck-based mechanics that are constantly being modified, but its documentation is terrible, whether on the wiki, forums, redditr, or even in chatbots, there are many things missing, poorly explained, or simply wrong.
The progression and scaling of the game makes no sense at all if played in a direct and honest way, which is why there are so many fun strategies, or at least there were, because these are also constantly patched, which is quite frustrating.
I'm a big fan of stats for each action that increase the more you repeat the function, much like in 2D Final Fantasy, or even the Elder Scrolls series.
But if in those games you tediously repeat actions to gain incredible buffs and become overpowered in the game, in Elin the scaling is very slow and unrewarding, that is, when there aren't very specific rules preventing you from abusing it, like eating to gain stats. It's already a lot of effort to get the food that gives some buff to the stats, but if you want to vomit to eat a few more times in a row, you get a very annoying disease that bothers you for several days in-game.
Small comment, the overall design is great, and the pixel art too, but the character portraits aren't. They have a great style, but from the mods you can already see that their art lacks polish. Also customization of Residents leaves something to be desired, as it doesn't allow changing the sprite or the NPC icon.
The resource collection and weight management mechanics are awful. There's no explanation whatsoever for needing to hire a delivery system to transport items purchased in the city.
Stones are very heavy at the beginning of the game, so picking up even a few (literally) breaks your legs.
Also regarding the resource collection system, the item drop rate is extremely tedious, difficult due to its resistance to weaker materials, and always yields little reward. Cutting down a new tree only gives you ONE SINGLE LEAF, and you need several dozen to build a simple grass house.
Another thing that's very annoying is the passage of time. Cutting down 3 trees at the beginning of the game is enough to pass a day, but not enough to build a single chest. Furthermore, traveling during the passage of time is also annoying, and fast travel is even worse with the screen flashing and sound effects that are too fast for what should be a cutscene.
Returning to the crafting aspect, Many of the most basic recipes should be available after the first tutorial missions, but no, it's a gamble for you until the recipes randomly drop.
If only dismantling something had a 100% chance of getting the recipe, or something close to that.
There are 20 different workbenches, which are quite expensive to make at the beginning of the game, and which are often redundant, or even almost useless with fewer than 5 possible recipes (even with all recipes unlocked).
Furthermore, the alchemy, armor and weapon crafting systems, etc., are incomplete, to say the least.
The invasion system is very annoying, you don't know where the invaders are, and the penalty for recovering your dead residents is very high.
To complain about the combat system, items can be burned, melted, or frozen. If it were just the random items I found on the dungeon floor, I wouldn't be so angry, but losing the rare items in my hotbar is a real bummer.
The characters, are very funny, the missions are cool, and the story is good, buuuut only a small part of the story exists at the moment. It was really sad to discover that before even reaching the halfway point of one of the main plots, there was no more direct lore content to enjoy, maybe except for some very obscure side missions.
This is another problem with the game; everything in it is very obscure and unintuitive—buttons, controls, mechanics—everything is strange, without a clear pattern, without using common game mechanics, without explanations, without even a short text in the menu giving some tips.
Some mechanics are overly complex and confusing, while others are so shallow that they didn't even need to be implemented.
I quite like mechanics of exploding an egg in the microwave, or extracting milk from strong bosses, or capturing monsters with balls, but all these mechanics have been severely nerfed, cutting out a good part of the sandbox fun that should be the main attraction of a game that still lacks a closed story.
The construction system is unnecessarily costly and confusing, making the task of making beautiful buildings a pain in the ass.
Much of the effort is focused on diminishing the freedom and creativity of the players, which wouldn't be the biggest problem if the game were finished, while at the same time it's the freedom and absurdity that attract players (besides underage girls).
Like other games do, block the passage of time when performing certain tasks, such as auto-dumping, construction, crafting, and traveling across the map. At least modify it so that time passes more slowly when performing such tasks.
Increase the drop rate of materials and decrease their weight.
You want to maintain the realism of the weight of things, but an entire tree drops a single branch/leaf???
Same thing when mining huge rocks or dismantling items, there's clearly more than one single gravel in the 500kg of item I dismantled.
Besides the recipes dropping, of course.
Items in the hotbar should be protected from destruction effects and not auto-dumping.
A recipe book that aids in material processing; a simple list of results when using a mallet or hammer on something is sufficient.
Markers on the minimap for enemies that have invaded the base and a warning when this happens.
An alchemy system that actually works, for the love of God! Being at the mercy of randomness is terrible, the same goes for working with scrolls, grimoires, and rods—things like combining items, weapons, and properly removing their effects to be used in other ways.
Imagine how cool it would be to get, for example, a fireball rod, disassemble it into a wooden bar, a glass ball, and a fireball spellbook, and this spellbook can be disassembled into several fireball scrolls and vice versa.
Change the bonuses as if they were runes. I'm asking for a system where enchantments and bonuses have slots and can be removed and replaced to assemble more coherent equipment, in the same way that runes already do, but with all the buff lines individually as slots.
I don't want to end on a negative note, so I'll talk about the three best things about this game:
The universal search system with Ctrl+F is wonderful.
The auto-dumping system with filters in the chests is also wonderful.
And the crafting board, my god, the endgame with automatic gathering and mining is so perfect that it almost makes me forget how bad it is to gather and craft items in this game.
That's all I had to say (I think). The game is very poorly balanced, which happens a lot with solo developers or very small teams, where they don't play like a novice struggling to carry a few stones, because they have access to unlimited item spawns and know the tricks of their games well.
After "getting the game for free" and playing for a few hours, I wasn't really connecting with it, but after several videos and reviews, and spending hours of my free time reading and testing the game's console and cheats, I decided to buy it and spent another hundred hours playing.
