I was excited for this game before its release; the aesthetic is amazing, and I was looking for a new cozy game to play, however --
At the full price I really cannot recommend the game, to be honest. Get it on sale. It's fine if you like a very repeatable loop and a rather slow story. It has some good story beats here and there, b ut it's ultimately undone by the pacing.
The game is /fine/, it's just there's so many issues, bugs and just gameplay wise, that all could have been solved with an early access. Flowers not growing back if there's too much grass, trees just not growing back at all . And then there's the pacing issues of the story; why do I sometimes have to wait days, if not weeks, b etween main story beats? Even linked quests it's often just 'come back tomorrow', it leaves me frustrated because I want to see things progress, especially when a lot like the museum, and alternate forms are locked behind story progression.
Which is another issue; the progression feels backwards. It takes near the end of the story to get your third form, but other than getting to a f ew places, it doesn't really add much at the time you get it. By the time I had it all my tools were already gold, and I had done most of the things on the rest of the map. It's as if they added it so late simply to give you the bat nooks and things to go into to elongate your time since certain things for the museum only drop from them from what I've seen. Bat form should have been earlier in the game, it's so underwhelming by the time you get it. I feel like had bat form been much earlier on, it would have felt far more useful and given me more stuff to do earlier on while waiting for the story to progress.
I don't understand why you can expand your energy when you later get tools that don't require any energy. By the time you g et energy expansions, I assume most players have already figured out how to make the most of their energy and what things to cook, etc. Plus it didn't seem to do much, it felt as if the tools were % based rather than flat number, my energy drained just as fast. Like bat form, perhaps energy expansions should be accessed earlier in the story to make them worthwhile.
There also seems to be such little point to the magic system. You can only regen one mana over night, and magical crops require magical watering -- so your mana will be used on that. You can make potions and foods to restore mana, but it would be nice for it to be passive, whether it's just from sleeping in a better coffin, or just when you get a better wand. The yoga minigame can restore it, but the minigame feels kind of tedious and overall doesn't give mana back that often for it to be worth it.
I think my biggest gripe is that you cannot see the townies stories past the four initial hearts without dating them. Why. Those initial hearts aren't even enough to give you an idea of what dating those characters will even be like for most of the npcs. I really wanted to progress evan, mina, and orlocks together to hopefully see them heal as a family, but it's just not possible unless you date all of them and well... I don't particularly like to date multiple characters in games anyway, but dating both kids and the dad at the same time feels a little weird anyway lol. You also h ave chars like Kim wh o state "I want people to see there's more to me than a pretty face" and I'm like cool yeah, but then throughout her initial hearts doesn't do a single thing to show that and don't get me wrong, it's fine to have characters who's whole thing is just being pretty (whcih tbh seems to be her brother who is the one I decided to date lol), just don't promise growth if you're not even going to set it up early. From what I've heard, too, marriage just seems so boring and static and brings the relationship to ultimately a standstill with no dating, and some chars not even moving in with you???
Money making is fairly simple, which is fine, it just feels so boring to have a farm full of grapes and wheat because that's whats worth most. Autumn and winter no grapes, and the greenhouse is locked behind a high museum %, too, byt he time you get that you'll bbe done with the game, too. One of the fish is ridiculous to get (missing) -- and to note you can't donate star quality fish it HAS to be common so ify ou get a rare fish but it's star you're screwed. One of the other fish requires the 15th of the month, AND a large rod, luckily it's fairly abundant during that night or so I experienced but it feels so... arbitary. IT's difficult to tell which bugs you've already caught because so many look similar, and there's no hint anywhere of where or how you spawn a majority of them. A lot of the other drops are rng based on bat windows, diving, mining, digigng, etc, and some need recipes -- one of which I still cann't find and it's the fur chair and it's getting frustrating. I usually don't mind collecting stuff for museums in these types of games, but this one is just a bit of a slog -- you can't even go into museum rooms without going to the main room first, and you have to be in the rooms to donate, you can't just do it from th emain room, which I guess is because of how the 10% rewards work, but still....
It's also not worth to sell crops without processing them, at all. Not even early on.
Also considering the amount of bugs which cause you to have to alt+f4 out of the game and lose your whiole days progress, it really bothers me you can't save whenever you want.
Most of the above issues really would have been solved with early access and constant feedback; the problem is at the price point, and with how many small things there are they all build up and make the game frustrating, for me. I'm at a point in the game where I just have nothing to really do -- I gave up trying to get the one fish for the museum because I was too worried it would be star quality and I'd just end up more annoyed than before, I have no reason to talk to townies because hearts are maxed to four. I can't upgrade my house until I get 150k which I just wait for wine to make for that, It's also gated on dark wood of which I exhausted the maps for, so I have no reason to do anything past watering my crops, doing a quick circut around town for bat nooks, digging and diving spots, and then just going to sleep.
I really want to enjoy this game, I have 50+ hours, I gave it a good try constantly waiting to just go 'oh these little issues are solved now', but the longer the game goes on the more frustrating these things are. On the good side, the devs do seem to be listening to bug reports and feedback, so hopefully a lot of problems getting reported on their discord will be fixed and changed at some point.
