I have to agree with some of the negative reviews here, this is a nice and relaxing little "puzzle" game about restoring the environment, but then things are just not communicated well and you start running into issues just finishing a dang map. The fact that you have to take pictures, of all the animals (and some other pics), and have them be at max happiness, but then you only get to plan around how to make them happy at the very end? I feel like these are requirements really should be the main goal then since they are really the only one that gives me trouble.
And at least early you can get stuck in a position where the only way to proceed is to make your restoration look incredibly ugly (would you like to take some time right before ending the map to look at how many extra ditches you needed to dig to make someone a little bit more wet because you forgot about that at a previous stage? I don't, looks ugly as sin now). The only alternative is to start over because whether you made a mistake two actions ago or an entire stage ago there is no more going back, you only get one undo.
This is of course not even to mention that the way that the game communicates all these via the tutorial is incredibly infuriating. I am giving a bit of text, and then where did it go? Dev, seriously, you need to tell people things at least 3 times in 3 separate ways for them to understand it. For example: Put a popup on screen telling you your next immediate goal, then a box with more details, then in the guidebook even more information on what that means. At the very least I need a way to pull the info up again easily because it took a web search to even figure out how to actually leave, with the UI making it very difficult to understand what is optional and what is mandatory to do so. In the tutorial I spent far too long not understanding that I needed to figure out how to get wolves, and then also somehow bodge things around until the landscape is scarred but they have enough food and water and whatever.
These are not my main complaints though. My main complaint is how it plays on the Steam Deck. The performance takes big hits and it really does not look like it should given what is happening on screen, but I can stomach that despite being a bit uncomfortable to play. Instead my main issue with the game is the UI. Every action that you take endlessly confuses me. You press left and the building select cursor disappears and the animal panel pops up. Thats weird, I wouldn't do that but I guess I might get used to it in a couple more hours of playing (maybe), but for gods sake, why does the building select cursor just completely forget which building I am on. On switching to a new building selection section this makes sense, but it seems that everything I do, including but not limited to just selecting a building (which can accidentally click on an animal), it just forgets its place. Animal panel, opening the book, pausing, its literally just about everything but pressing down to get more info on a building. Opening the camera zooms all the way in, but closing it does not return the zoom level back to what it was making navigation a pain. Like sure, you learn to automate these things in your head after a time: to take a picture of a specific animal select that animal in the animal pane, back all the way out, then click the stick to go into picture mode, then make sure you back out and hold L2 to zoom out again so you can actually see what you are doing. But why do I have to do this myself? This is something that I am doing like 6 separate times for each animal I have at full happiness, just let me jump straight to taking a pic of an animal.
If I am being unreasonable I would also like to ~~complain about~~ ask for a few other things. Controller support should really lock the cursor to the middle of the screen, only allowing it to move from the center when you touch the stick to fine tune your placement. Likewise it would be great to have the ability to nudge buildings about by only a single tile, as that is how to figure out the most optimal placement for a building a lot of the time, maybe override dpad functionality temporarily (why do you need see animal info when placing a building? the optional goals are already disabled). Also being able to tell at a glance if you are in building placing mode or not would be nice as it is trivial to lose the cursor as you move the camera around, it just gets stuck in the corner. Having a border on the screen or highlighting the cursor in a contrasting color, or even a little header out outline around the building select panel, or even the previously mentioned locking the cursor to the middle of the screen so you cannot lose it at all. There are many different ways to go about this, I do not wish to claim that I know the best.
Overall I love the message of the game, I enjoy the gameplay and the sort of strategic thinking that it requires despite being about undoing damage, and the art is gorgeous and the music is. I cannot for the life of me control this game though, its too easy to get lost in the UI and planning ahead for goals at the end requires too much memorization or just restarting once you figure out what they are, which come on, obviously not a ton of fun. I wish this game was better, I really do want to play it.
