This one is a bit tough. There are a lot of things to like about this game. It looks gorgeous, and it has a lot of unique ideas in terms of how it plays and the things you find in the game. The animals and people in the game are adorable and it's a lot of fun to just watch the AI do the things you queued up for them.
However, it's also a very confusing design. When you enter the game, you are immediately thrown into the game with very basic instructions and a ghost guide, but they only explain the most basic of controls and what to interact with. The game is deep in all of the special interactions that happen between the different things you can do, but the visibility of these interactions is extremely poor. Sometimes you have no idea what a thing you bought does, and other times you have no idea that a thing can do something important.
In the beginning, it feels cozy and slow, and you feel the game is halfway exploration and halfway city building, though a bit simple and minimalist in that regard. But the tower defense bit seems to get in the way of exploration when the mechanics are so obtuse in the beginning, and the tower defense isn't particularly satisfying when you want to see what the game offers before trying too hard to survive. So what is the identity of this game then? Should you try to push difficulty as a strategy game or should you play on peaceful and just explore its contents?
It turns out neither, because on peaceful there's nothing happening and not much to explore. As a strategy game, the highest difficulty is not much different from normal and is a bit slow, with a lot of obscure rules to get familiar with first. The publisher even put out an in-depth tutorial video on Youtube, but even the [i]40 minute long[/i] explanation was still missing a lot of important details if you want to fully understand what's happening.
So I wouldn't recommend this game in general. However, if you want a blend of exploration, tower defense, a game that looks beautiful, and don't mind losing key resources or sinking a modest amount of time into the game, then I would recommend going into the game blind, but keep the wiki handy and refer to it as often as you like.
