Kynseed

A lot of fun to be had, but it doesn't feel that well executed. I would like to recommend it, but as a whole package it feels a bit disappointing, especially towards the latter parts of the game. It's by then you realise that the things that seemed core and important to the game are actually quite hollow and have no depth at all. My biggest improvement suggestion would definitely have to be: Make the [spoiler] the Kynseed [/spoiler] more important and force me to [spoiler] age faster [/spoiler] throughout the story. Make it more integral. Managing to finish the story without it should be a rare and tricky achievement, not what happens if you just play the game normally. More details: The pacing is weird, and I don't know if I should be rushing or delaying using a certain core feature of the game. But in the end I realised that you can do the tutorial part and then never touch it again throughout the entire game. [spoiler] The Kynseed and generational aging part of the game seems very important, but it's actually completely unnecessary and you don't need to engage with it whatsoever. [/spoiler] Family seems to just be there for slave labour. The game doesn't seem to put any more value in it at all, which was very disappointing. I had a wife and three kids, none of which said or did anything interesting. No interesting experiences, events, or references. [spoiler] After I finished the story I gave the Kynseed a try and passed it on to one of my children. The effect on me was basically: I have different stats and a new name. The rest of the family disappeared. The siblings vanished with no provided context, and my wife had been sacrificed while I was gone. For such a core and even the titular feature, it is incredibly gimmicky and hollow. [/spoiler] So all-in-all, I greatly enjoyed the game but it feels too bare-bones to be called finished. While the moment to moment gameplay and mini-games are great fun, certain core feature (and family relationships) need WAY more work.

After playing for more than 275 hours (and finally beating the game and getting most achievements) I think it is time to finally drop the review. I totally recommend this game. It is a fae apocalypse (fae as in old fairytales, not disney kind of fairies - might be cute sometimes, but very much inhuman), it has a ton of references and jokes, it has a TON of different things to do, and it is filled with beautiful images and music. This is not a farm sim! I heard many people getting recomended as farmsim, it is not. You live on a farm, and you can do a lot of things with your farm like extensive decoration, growing a lot of different varieties of crops, herbs and fruits. You can even get meat from animals in addition to growing it on plants which is extremely rare in modern gaming. But you are not a farmer. You are an adventurer, who can chose to be a farmer for a lifetime or two. Yep, heard this right - you are not a static figure in a world that barely changes, both you and everyone (including most animals) age and die. You can continue to play as your chosen heir - or get some orphan for the same thing if you didn't bother with any of that boring social things while you were busy slaying monsters of fishing. First generation NPCs are premade, but all NPCs after that (including ones born in the world and ones who move in to erplace dead ones without heirs of their own) are generated with random traits and appearance which keeps things fresh and requires you to actually use the mechanics that would assist in learning NPC's traits - which is needed for construction project assisance and shop mechanics. These NPCs are also needed to make sure your bloodline has all the desired genes, and maybe even cultivate some appearance trait like hair or skin colour - obviously those are inheritable. Yep, you can run a shop. Or two. Or three. Or almost all of them shoppes in the pretty decently sized world. Run it yourself, get your family members working for free or hire employees that you will need to treat nicely so they don't get pissed off and quit. There are 3 shop types (with 3 specialisations each) and a tavern that you can buy and run. You can have a ton of different pets. Some of them are magical and would be with you through all the lifetimes. Some are mundane and will pass away (unlwss you employ some magic to keep them alive). Aside crafting minigames (tons of them, all nice but soup making, I hate soup making) there are races both for you and your pets, there are other games and there are a lot of hidden secrets that I can only hope I'll actually ever get, because some of them require really rare circumstainces. In addition to a decently sized main quest and a unique personal quest for each of premade NPCs, there are notice board randomly generated infinite quests kinda like in Skyrim. Your friends can also utilise this system to give your personal requests via mail or in person. One of most lovely pieces of QoL is ability to drop off whatever you wanted to give to an NPC in their family mailbox. I like Kynseed's fishing a lot, it is a breath of fresh air in an ocean of Stradew clones with their cancer ass fishing minigame. There is no stamina to artificially limit what you can do in a day, you don't even need to sleep unless you need to save or progress time. You don't need to eat, but you will anyways because all consumables give different boosts and temporaty traits. Thing that I wish was different is minimalistic character customisation. On startup, you can customise your hairstyle, hair colour and name - that's it. Later - very much later in storyline - you get ability to recolour the clothes (and hair, but this is accessible earlier). But at no point you can CHANGE clothing, it is always the same outfit. I wish we could chose different outfits, but it's not gonna happen because devs done with the game major additions, and reworking whole character thing would be a major taking. Something one might not notice from trailers - the characters are intentionally not-pretty, like you would not see the world filled with perfect beautiful people. They are made different and quirky, and for eyes used to the modern standart of perfection, it might be hard to accept, so if it is very important for you - make sure to look up some pics and vids to see how people look in this game. Each settlement in the beginning, when there is no travelling between areas have distinct styles. After you unlock everywhere and your shops start attracting people from all over the world (and old people start dieing out and getting replaced) new residents would muddle the theme untill most of population is somewhat mixed.

Spoilers Ahead: The people are insane. This isn't just a generic 'Cowgirl A' personality, 'Bookworm B'. I skipped most of the dialogue, thinking it would just be 'normal' people having normal lives. No. This is not that game. Yes, its a farming sim like Harvest Moon or Rune Factory. Your cozy life as the 'New Person' in town where you decide to either own a farm, own a shop, be an adventurer, or all the above. It's far more sandbox and open than most Farming Sims. But that's where it stops being normal. People are sacrificed at old age to the Goddess like its Cult of the Lamb. Children will confide in you, wishing their parents could be send to the Goddess so they can live their own life. An elderly couple cheated on each other with their younger neighbors. Your in-game sibling acknowledges the town you live is in CRAZY and leaves to live his own free life. All the while, you pay Life Taxes to an Eldritch horror Fae Trickster for QoL farming tools and sacrifice you, your firstborn, and your future legacy children whenever each one turns 50. Don't have a kid? That's fine, the Fae will accept orphans you adopt. This is not a utopia where the town needs saving. This is a dystopia where the town doesn't need or want your saving, and the gameplay and individual townsfolk storylines are better for it. The minigames are hard, but not required for success. You can choose to either work your own shop, selling items and bartering yourself or hire the townsfolk to do it for you. You can own EVERY shop, and hire EVERY townsperson. Or you can just be a free spirit, living on the edge with dungeon running until you wipe because the combat at full speed is difficult and rewarding... Or you can just do what I do and just vibe with these people who would terrify the residents of Stardew Valley. Not because they are terrifying in nature, but because the culture is so abstractly different. Hate your husband's guts? Send em to the Goddess. Your neighbor pissed on your fence? Send em to the Goddess. The Town Clown looked at you funny? Bet your sweet bippy I'll send em to the Goddess.

Kynseed has charm, hits a particular itch that some farming-sims struggle to actually reach, and is mysterious. My gripes typically revolve around the pacing and overall flow of the game. Structure - in the tutorial, you return to bed at 11pm every night, which sets a nice flow to the game, do morning chores, explore in the afternoon, and wait to drop asleep wherever you are. When you grow up after the tutorial, you no longer ever need to sleep, there are no caveats, stipulations, or incentives, except that saving is linked to sleeping. I often wandered the maps for days without paying any attention to the time because there isn't any urgency or need to do any specific thing. Nothing actively requires food or maintenance. Documentation - I've seen multiple quests and "hints" that are straight up incorrect or misleading, based on either updates or just referencing a throw-away line from the tutorial. I didn't learn how to "catch" bugs until 35 hours in, when I stumbled upon a wiki page (Categoy:Insects). The "story" quest for Geoffery Black sat in my quest log for the in-game year I've played at time of writing, because it seemed like a tutorial related to catching insects (via bug net) would be introduced at some point. Pott the Brouney has no purpose after the tutorial, but there are multiple dialogs hinting at giving him milk. Again, thought this was a Later feature, but found out, again via the internet, that this was content removed from the game. Genre mainstays missing - Kynseed has animals that have stats. Hidden stats only available at auction, but stats. Kynseed also has no breeding mechanics for animals, and no use for the stats, as they appear to be cosmetic in nature. Timegated seasonal events happen, but it is unclear in-game where they happen, no-one says "I can't wait to go over to Poppyhills on day x of summer for this event", you just get a pop up on the side of your screen that it is starting, but there isn't anything I found in-game which hints at where or when these occur. Maypole is midsummer, makes sense, but WHERE is it. I checked multiple of the village maps and couldn't find it. Those are things that generally felt missing and detracted from the games charm, outside of that, I did have a few things that personally nit-pick felt bad. Deep Mines - its implied via multiple NPC's that this is a Dangerous Place. It's dangerous in that you get chased by squealing mobs that kick you out to a singular entrance, with no other repercussions. Your only way of combatting this is by getting a third level perk from Sibling, which makes the entire mechanic moot. Why not use the battle system? make it an actual feature of the mines. Time Crunch or Incentive - There doesn't seem to be any incentive to time management. Animals will binge whenever you feel like feeding them, immediately removing any incentive for using the auto-feeder, which is also disincentivized by animal scat dropping on the ground only when you are in-map and exclusively being used for growing crops. Plants don't rot if left untended or fully grown and are active across multiple concurrent seasons, so you can just plant cabbage S1 in the morning and come back S6 and S9 to water and S14 pick up those same crops. At the end of the year you pay a time "tax" based on what you bought and how many times you whited-out in a combat sequence, but this incentivizes not skipping any time. I haven't gotten to the relationship or child-rearing part of the game yet, but I'm not confident it will add enough replay value to keep me engaged for long enough to increase the PC's stats to matter. In conclusion, Kynseed feels very incomplete, but made with love. the characters are funny, the sprites have whimsey, and the maps are amazing. I just wish the love extended past surface level systems and artwork.

기계번역으로 플레이가 어려워 비공식 유저 한패 만들었습니다. 공식보다 이해 가능한 정도입니다ㅜㅜ 이상의 자연스러운 번역은 스크립트 수가 너무 많아 힘들 것 같아요. https://posty.pe/bzh105

[b]That's a huge one[/b] Just in case - [b]MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING[/b] What made me buy Kynseed? As a huge fan of Stardew Valley and the old Harvest Moon titles, I was pretty curios about Kynseed. Especially because of the "Generation-Mechanic". There was always something off about playing many ingame years, having children und buying animals in SV and HM, so I was madly interested in a game that simply continues and is not leaving me at some sort of random state of my current being - with children that never grow up and immortal animals. I think I bought Kynseed during Early Access but never really started a playthrough since like two weeks ago. And let me just say - I couldn't think of anything else but Kynseed, since I started. [i]Keep in mind that the following pros and cons are my personal experience and that you might not feel the same about it.[/i] [b]Pros:[/b] - This pixelart style is like crack and cocaine to me, the entire gamedesign made me want to rip out my eyes and smudge them onto my screen to appreciate every pixel. - This game is giving you so many options, like fighting in forests, owning multiple shops, customizing your farm & house, friendship, marriage and having children, "Skilltrees", many quests and a lot of lovely places to explore. - This game is kinda creepy, there are like two random encounters, I think, that run shivers down my spine and some scary enemies that completey break the entire cutesie wootsie setting of Kynseed and I like that. - There is no penalty for working through the nights. I hated it, when you fainted at 2am in SV or HM, lost some items or you had to pay for your rescue. In Kynseed you are allowed to stay awake for as long as you want. - MINIGAMES omg I love them. [b]Let's head on with the cons:[/b] - The translation is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, it feels like Google Translate should be mentioned in the credits. - Animals are kind of useless (farm only, they will offer you different combat bonuses). Dogs and Pigs are pretty useful (digging spots and movement) but idk what cats are up to, chickens feel kinda useless too, 'cause once you increased your friendship with NPCs you can simply collect eggs from their chickens. I also think I never used milk from my cow unless for growing moss. - Quests become repetitive, since there are a lot of them, they spiral a lot around finding missing items, gifting different items, cooking and piggy races. These quests are literally quite easy, in most cases you can finish them immediatly without even looking for lost and wanted items, because you already carry a lot of them with you, especially during the late game. Since these quests are so easy to accomplish, you can kind of spam them once they appear on the towns board and increase your friendship with everyone. - The "late game" is going to be my next point, because it's simply not challenging. Once I started my playthrough and got access to all the different things the game offers you, I felt overwhelmed and thought that this will be a game I can put like hundreds of hours into. But unfortunately it's not. Once you own a few shops your income is increased like crazy. Since then money will never be a problem again and you're free to buy whatever you like. Everything else sadly feels so optional. Like you don't even need to finish your fighting skilltrees to defeat the endboss, it's literally so effortless. - My next point is about the "Generation-Mechanic". Remember when I said I was crazy hyped about playing as one of my children and become stronger and stronger. Well, I never reached this significant part. My planted Kynseed is fully evolved, I reached every limit and skilled my character. But my Character is like 20 or something. I finished the main story during my second ingame year. I've read some reviews and statements on reddit in which other players experienced the same. So I don't think this is some sort of "Me-Problem". I think you only lose some of your lifetime when dying in combat or buying ♥♥♥♥ from Fairwheather. - Fairwheather will be my last and most important point. He scared me so much and once he was talking about losing lifetime whenever you buy somehting, I kind of ditched it. I thought that there might be more ♥♥♥♥ that will make me lose many years of my life, so I didn't want to spent them immediately on random stuff. Random stuff in question, because the offerings Fairweather had seemed to be sooooo useless. Like for example, once you find a Statue of the Goddess you are free to quicktravel to another statue + you can ride pigs and sheep + you will get an item that teleports you to the circle. Which are already a lot of things to travel. He will offer you 3 more ways of quicktraveling, like, my brother in christ, I can already do that. A lot of these items are negatively affected by these conditions. They are most likely not even an upgrade, they are more likely a replacement of something that already exists, which resulted in me losing interest in Fairweather. I know that this might be a "con-wall-of-text" but I have to say, that I still had a lot of fun with Kynseed and I do not regret buying it. Since it's mentioned on their Discord that Kynseed is still in development and will be filled with more content, I highly recommend it. I mean, I also recommend the game in it's current state. It is and was a great experience. If you've already lost your heart to games like Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon, this one will feel like a moon landing straight into your endorphin system <3

Нет русского языка. А если ставишь русификатор то при каждом обновлении игры, игра будет вылетать. И не надо мне говорить что я должен знать Английски. Я хочу расслабиться и играть в игру. А не переводом игры заниматься.

Mh. This is close, to being a good Harvest Moon-Style life sim. Very close. Its charming and pretty and has a lot going on. But the overwhelming lack of direction kills it for me. There are many systems and places and things to do - but I dont feel motivated to engage with them. Theres no reason to farm (or cook or fish or fight) because theres no reason to make money because there is no overall goal or aim or sense of purpose. Kind of a shame. Especially the beginning, where you play one season as a child, is an absolute slog. Also the pun-obsessed writing is dumb and obnoxious, NPCs and interactions are shallow and the pacing is too slow.