Everholm

If you don’t have anything else to do with $20, set it on fire rather than buy this “game” Let’s get right into it. I bought this incompetent excuse for a farming game pretty much when it came out. It was not an early access game, even though these people knew before they pushed it out that it didn’t have a storyline, it was confusing and aimless, and that they had no idea what they were doing. I think I gave them enough of a chance to repair and communicate about their “game”. Even with all their updates, there is not a storyline to be had, the game runs like ♥♥♥♥ because optimization never occurred to them. The underworld dungeons are unintuitive, confusing and hard to complete. Their lack of accountability is the part that rubs me all the wrong ways. They are extremely comfortable charging strangers for what is essentially an inside joke between friends, without ever taking any responsibility for how broken their game is. These people promised a lot they didn’t deliver, and are still charging for it. I’m more disappointed still at the support the community is wasting on this studio that really does not deserve it. Not once have they apologized or taken any real responsibility for their many shortcomings. I will never buy a game from their studio; they have already proved they don’t understand the genre they’re charging for. Who makes a farming game with a kitchen that doesn’t work? People who seriously don’t understand what they’re doing. Don’t get this game.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Update March 19, 2026; There is a response from the developers below demonstrating their level of dishonesty, and to a certain point delusion. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to continue handing money to a studio not able to be honest with their shortcomings and what the community asks from them in exchange for their support.

I have a few hundred hours of playtime on another profile, and overall I’m very satisfied with the game. I can easily recommend it to farming simulator fans and anyone who enjoys cozy, relaxing experiences. The farming, exploring, crafting, and overall atmosphere are excellent. It's a solid 10/10 for gameplay and coziness. The developers also deserve full credit for actively fixing bugs and consistently supporting the game with updates and new content. The major 2.0 update also made the experience much smoother and more engaging, adding new content and expanding the story. My only criticism is that the game could have more cutscenes which would add into the overall story depth. Still, despite that, it’s a fantastic experience and well worth playing.

We got this game pretty cheap and played almost 100 hours, so it has definitely delivered value for money. Based on what I've read online, it sounds like there have been a lot of improvements since it was first released, so kudos to the developers for continuously improving the gameplay. Pros - [list] [*]Cute graphics [*]Characters are reasonably well developed. There isn't a ton of original dialogue with each character but they do have something of a personality that fits with what you'd expect from their back story. [*]Quite a lot of different things to do - quests, mini games, dungeons, collections, farming, magic. Nothing revolutionary there but each of those facets is quite well developed. It's a nice change that some of the features of other games in the genre (like moving buildings) are spells in Everholm [*]There is a sort of overall story to the game which gives it a kind of creepy undertone, which was a refreshing change of pace from most cozy games, although it didn't always feel like it made sense (maybe because we missed something, see later). But the story isn't so critical that you have to avoid doing the standard things like farming to follow the storyline, which I like [/list] Cons - [list] [*]The money in Everholm is not well balanced. You don't really need to farm much because going to the underworld provides so much free stuff that you can just sell. And since there are very few quests or other reasons to farm, that side of the game is not really worth pursuing. By the time we were a couple of seasons away from finishing the game, there was nothing left to buy and no reason to farm for anything [*]Gifting can be frustrating - there's no way to discover what people like, except sometimes by random conversation. Guessing based on personality isn't a good path forward because there are hundreds of giftable items and most people only like a few items [*]Trees - random complaint but the trees grow too fast everywhere. Once you [spoiler] get a broom to fly on [/spoiler] you're ok, but before that the tree growth makes getting anywhere very difficult [*]The last two are the biggest problems with the game IMO Story progression - very few of the things you need to do to progress the story are tracked as objectives. This is why there are many reviews and discussion topics saying 'what do I do next?'. We weren't even sure if the game had finished or not because there wasn't any objective for the last few seasons of play and no credits. Definitely frustrating for anyone (like us) who likes to see a game through to the end after playing 100 hours! [*]Ending - does this game have an ending? No idea. We completed everything we could find, including [spoiler] finishing the archive, beating all the (identical) dungeon bosses, making the dark sword and finding all the journal pages (which didn't show on the map). Then we talked to Melanie inside the tree, and she implied that there was a way to free her by talking to 'those who still dream', which seems like it would be the natural ending to the game. But we couldn't find any way to do that, no objective and no further dialogue or clues at all.[/spoiler]. We expected some end credits even if it wasn't a proper ending, but there was no indication if we were done or not. It was a real anticlimax after quite a bit of fun playing. [/list] This game would be so much better if there was a proper ending and proper guidance towards that ending, but overall it delivered a lot of hours of fun and the dev team is clearly invested in improving their game and delivering on requested features (like achievements). Would love to hear back about the ending!

I played for a little over an hour, and here's my first impressions: TL;DR: recommended but, be wary, it's confusing at first and not made for a mouse. Also, there's no modding community. Pro: You can turn off the fishing minigame. i saw that in the settings and immediately clicked it so fast. Cons: Where am I going? What am I doing? I don't have a fishing pole... where do i get one? I want to fish now that i don't have to do a cheap ragebait minigame. Pro: the graphics are so cute. Who's Tomos and why is he so mad at life? Get back here Tomos. Cons: It's hard to talk to people. Its hard to click around things. This game wasn't made for a mouse so clicking things is a chore and I constantly off-click and use up stamina/energy. How come I can't click on an empty spot in my hot bar? Neutral: We play a fem pov as Lilly, who is a character who lost her sister and is trying to find her. Con: I WANT TO CUSTOMIZE! Do I have to always wear this blue dress? And I want different color hair at least. Pro: Oh, we got artifact dig spots! And they're animated/easy to see. Nice. Now I just need to find the museum. Con: After an hour, I found the archive (museum)... (everything has ??? titles) but it's closed. Why? I have several artifacts now. OPEN UP IN THERE Con: WHY DOES EVERYTHING GO SO FAST I went from my farm to town and now it's night time. I need mods to slow time down. It's too fast for me and the little person has tiny slow sloth feet. I MUST BECOME SPEED Con2: No modding community. Damn. I recommend it, though. Needs tutorial help at the beginning. By the time you reach a place, it's probably closed, because everything closes early. Lilly's pov goes between not knowing where she is, to looking for her sister, to knowing everyone all at once. girl, make up your mind because you're making me dizzy.

谁跟你老兄？

Everholm is a very weak ripoff of Stardew Valley, basically a spooky ghost steals your little sister so you have to play Farmville in a retro pixelcrap village. There's a couple of dozen Stardew Valley ripoffs on Steam now, they're easy to make and that's why creatively bankrupt amateur developers love them, but they don't offer anything of value to PC gamers at all. This one lacks polish, is rough around the edges, and is generally of very poor quality. In fact the most amusing part of this game was the developers delusional pricing (this weak ripoff costs more than Stardew Valley!!!). More on that later. There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for. The amateur pixelcrap visual presentation here at best could have been an attempt to use "retro" as a crutch, a weak excuse to avoid admitting the developer wasn't capable of doing the job of a game developer this decade and creating cutting edge, high quality 3D visuals. While a lack of skill or funding is the explanation for this failure, it's no excuse. The end result of this incompetence is a game that looks dramatically inferior to professionally developed games. Terraria and Undertale succeeded [i]despite[/i] looking crap, not [i]because[/i] they look crap. To make matters worse, not only does this have pixelcrap "art", the pixelcrap isn't even applied consistently across the whole game. That jarring mismatch ruins any genuine "retro" authenticity from this pixelcrap nightmare. This also means the developer knew they could have done better, but maybe they chose not to, on purpose... that's a massive disservice to gamers. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. Those technical issues put this game beneath what is expected from a contemporary, professionally developed PC game. Let's talk about pricing and the actual value this has for gamers. Is this game one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam? Everholm has the completely unrealistic cash grab price of $20 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. For comparison, the $20 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Outer Wilds", "Monster Hunter Rise" or "Red Dead Redemption 2". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. No pixelcrap is worth $20. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.

好玩，虽然游戏还没做完但是已经够玩三十小时了，姐姐找妹妹的设定很喜欢，有些细思极恐的细节也很对味儿，地图显示NPC位置很棒很方便，后期的特殊宝箱可以随时随地开箱子是真方便，但我觉得提交任务物品一定要和npc对话不太好，毕竟游戏里做了邮箱，应该可以用邮箱提交物品赠送礼物，不然那邮箱不是浪费了吗？初始住宅就很好看，但我觉得还能在装修房屋上下点功夫，多弄点装修物品，开新房间，养宠物。我很好奇那个打不开的房间有什么，希望可以是揭开永恒岛黑暗一面的线索。希望后期可以有NPC生日派对，和主角生日收礼物的设定，不然总觉得感情不够真实。哦对了，后期一些献祭物品太离谱了，动不动一百个，尤其那个藤，要一百个，但掉率又很低，给我整崩溃了快，还好可以用复制机复制，但复制机生产效率又太低了……总之是个还有很多可以改进的宝藏游戏，我在手机日历上定了提醒，六个月后我再来玩玩看，期待更新

I have enjoyed my time with Everholm - it's cute, the story is intriguing, and the QOL features disguised as magic and spells are a great inclusion in the game. I also appreciate the game settings that allow you to disable the fishing minigame and change the length of the day. It's got great vibes, but I think I've maxed out my enjoyment at 12 hours, which is totally fine, I picked it up on sale so that's good value for entertainment. Part of me wants to keep playing to see the conclusion to the story, max out relationships with the characters, and see all the game has to offer, but my desire to move on to new experiences outweighs that interest. I think ultimately, the game while quite refined, filled with content, and brimming with personality doesn't go as deep as I'd like to keep me coming back. Here are some criticisms of Everholm that create just enough friction as to keep me from investing more time in the game: - The characters are very shallow with many recycled text lines, and there are too many items in the game with no real hints or system to help identify which gifts characters are neutral about, like, or love. It's complete trial and error and often items you'd think they'd like based on their personality, they don't like or love (flower girl doesn't like most flowers?). Given that you can only give one gift per day and there are many townsfolk, it's a slog giving gifts to everyone each day only to find that 95% of the items are just neutral for each character. The wiki is also not up-to-date with the latest version release that overhauled this system, so I can't even look it up to avoid the slog. - The progression/objective of the game is just too familiar and derivative. You have to complete bundles of items in the same manner as the community center in Stardew Valley and venture into a dungeon fighting monsters (although I will say the intrigue of the dungeon and it's connection to the story and the setting is more interesting than many other farm sims with dungeons) to progress in the story and unlock features on your farm and in the town. I've been there, done that, and am getting bored just trying to create or find all the items necessary while grinding into the dungeon. - The pace is just too slow. Maybe it's because I've done this before in many other similar games, but I think there are too many days in a month, too many characters to engage with per day, and not enough unique interactions or objectives to keep each day exciting. I like the quest/mission system to encourage short term goals, but they are always the same thing - collect this many of that thing or build a new object and it's done. - Music and sound design is fine, but not standout which is tough in a game where you are hearing the same music and sounds over and over and over again. In the end, I think this is a fun, cute, and well-made farming sim with lots of personality, beautiful art, great QOL features, and an intriguing premise, and I do recommend it on those merits to those who like this genre. However, in my opinion, it is too derivative of other farm sims (especially Stardew Valley) and too shallow in terms of story and characters to invest more than a dozen or so hours into. So if you're looking for another farm sim to just grind away in and love the relationship system and bundle completion system in Stardew, you'll probably like this more than I did. If my criticisms are throwing up red flags for you, then you might want to pick it up on sale or avoid in it's current state. Last note - I'll give kudos to the devs who are still adding content and making pretty major changes to the game (and listening to feedback in reviews and on reddit), so maybe some or all of my criticisms will no longer apply in time, but for now, I'm happy to say thank you, and goodbye to Everholm.