Forager

грёбаная гриндилка но интересно

This game seems to have all the elements of a good game. But the feel of it is just... off. Very off. The mechanic of buying and connecting islands makes the game feel very claustrophobic because you have such limited space to work with. On top of the limited space, resources are constantly spawning slightly faster than you can clear them away. That's necessary so you can keep making more things, but it increases the feeling of not having any room to work with when you have to be constantly clearing the same space. Enemies are also constantly spawning, and while they're never a threat, they are a constant annoyance. Skeletons go after your buildings and make a loud, aggravating attacking sound, but are hard to see amongst everything going on, so even if your base is small you'll be frantically searching around trying to find where the skeleton is (it usually turns out that they're on the other side of the map, seemingly attacking nothing). Slimes constantly jump at you from other islands, and while they almost never damage you, the possibility is still there, so you have to spend time clearing them away as well. But then you have to get back to clearing and gathering resources. There's never a chance to take a moment and plan out what you need to do next, or figure out how to organize your base, or just appreciate what you've built and watch it work. On top of all that, the camera and mouse controls feel oddly loose and far too fast. Even with the appropriate settings turned down and mouse panning turned off, the game feels strangely slick. The pixelized art style that isn't actually pixel art (I'm not sure how to describe it - it's pixel art that's animated at far too high a resolution so the pixels squish and rotate and aren't the same size) adds to this feeling of looseness, and is mildly nauseating. I didn't mean to be so negative in this review. The gameplay loop of collecting materials to build things to make better stuff to buy more space to collect more materials should be great. But playing the game feels like you're late for class but can't run in the hallway, so you have to awkwardly speed walk, but also you're wearing greased clown shoes. Edit: After coming back to this game with a clearer head, I was too harsh on it. Eventually I got used to the wobbliness of the game and the claustrophobia lessoned. A lot of the annoyances I had at the start have solutions later into the game. So it's really just the beginning that's very rough. It still feels like the game needs a lot of polishing though, the sound and default settings especially. I had to play the game muted and with all notifications turned off because it's just far, far too hectic with them on. Some of the gameplay is strange as well, since it seems to be an automation game, yet certain items (farming especially) cannot be automated. Also the dungeons are very tedious, but they're not the focus of the game at all so I'll let that pass. Overall, this has been a very negative review, but I think that's because this game is very close to being great. There are just so many things that would be fantastic if slightly tweaked. Worth checking out if you like automation/collecting/building type games.