[h2] 🍜Ramen-ten 'Heart Abyss' Review🥢 [/h2]
I had a hard time trying to decide if I wanted to recommend this game or not. This wasn't because the game wasn't good, so to say it just has a lot of issues, which I will explain!
The concept of the game is very fun: running a small ramen stand and serving lovely dishes of food to customers. You can unlock skills and upgrades, and there are even decorations available to customise your stand, as well as character outfits.
I love the art style it is very pretty. The music in-game is very chill, although repetitive. Ramen-ten is an idle game, but to make it clear, for the first 2–3 hours you will be somewhat actively playing until you unlock the "auto refilling" upgrades for your vegetables, meat, and fish. Until you get those upgrades, you need to stock everything up yourself, so just make sure you keep an eye on that.
As good as the game is, there are a lot of bugs, unbalanced gameplay (in my opinion), and broken achievements, which was a big disappointment once I found out. There are a good handful of bugs, from UI issues and simply not being able to click things, to hovering over items not always working (like hovering over skills to see what they do). There is also an issue with the text bubbles. I liked reading what the characters were talking about, but a lot of the text is cut off. Other bugs include storage getting stuck and no longer upgrading. I also had an issue where the game would start lagging, and I had to restart it 3 or 4 times because of it. There were just a lot of issues in general. It was frustrating, and I felt that instead of leaving the game idle, I needed to babysit it lol.
As for the game being unbalanced, I believe there are a few issues here. You can earn skills and upgrades very quickly. Of course, you do need to focus on some of these for the whole "idle" aspect of the game, but it would have been nice to have more upgrades to work towards later on. The amount of money you earn is also just too much. I became so rich in the game that I had nothing to spend it on other than recipes, which take ages to unlock because the XP required to level up is very slow (as intended for an idle game). This makes money feel a bit pointless, especially when I've already upgraded my ingredient boxes so much that I have no need to spend any more on them. I do think the game needs a a balancing check with its XP, money, and progression systems, to make it more rewarding and encourage players to keep playing.
Achievements are sadly broken. I unlocked a couple of achievements early for things I hadn't actually done yet, like buying an outfit for one of the NPCs. I got that achievement before I'd even bought one. The main issue, though, is an achievement called "Golden Age". No one knows how to unlock it. It was confirmed to be broken by the developers, who admitted they can't fix it at the moment. Instead of removing the achievement, however, they gave instructions on how to edit your save file to unlock it. The problem is, even that doesn't work, so players are being told to modify their save files for no reason. I know this is a bit picky, but I HATE that they'd rather players mess around with their save files than either fix the issue or remove the achievement altogether. The achievement is still unobtainable, making it impossible to 100% the game for achievement hunters.
If you can put aside the bugs, the unbalanced progression, and don't care about achievements, the game is enjoyable. It's simple, cozy, and gets to the point where you can just leave it running and let it do its thing.
So, in the end, I decided to give this game a thumbs down. That doesn't mean I think it's a bad game, because I don't. The core idea is fun, the gameplay is cozy, and everything is there for it to become a really great idle game. Unfortunately, in its current state, there are just too many negative points for me to recommend it. Between the bugs, the unbalanced progression, and the broken achievements, it feels like the game needed more time in development. If the developers continue to give it the love and attention it needs, I'd happily come back and change my review in the future. But as it stands right now, I can't recommend it. If I'm being completely honest, had I known about the broken achievements before I was past Steam's refund window, I probably would have refunded the game.
Thanks for the meal, Ramen-ten. I just hope the next bowl comes with a little more polish 🍥
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