The Last Craftsman

This game is a cozy not just farming game. In fact, the farming is not as important as the building, as you build things all the time. The research system and the high tech tools with modifications you can equip (and you don't have to stand next to absolutely everything when you harvest) are a neat departure from similar games. Fun to play through.

A comfy crafting game, with a lot of depth. Researching things is very satisfying. Also nice to see a lot of little details like the cute animals and vegetation swaying in the breeze. I have not finished it but I am enjoying it so far. There's so much that you can do each day.

I put 30 hours into this in Early Access, then begrudgingly put it down to wait for 1.0. At time of writing, I've sunk in another 85 and I'm pretty close to 100%. I don't usually review games, but I know the algorithm is rough on single devs who advertise their games on dead internet forums. Game's good. You're a Craftsman, a one-man-band whose Omnitool lets you harvest rocks, trees, plants, fish, and more. Every item has "tags" based on its properties - texture, color, material, temperature, and so on - which are used in crafting and machine processing. Cut down a tree to get Lumber and Leaves. Use the latter to make a Teddy Bear for someone who wants a Cute thing, or maybe a Toy. Feed the former into a Coke Furnace, then use the resulting Coke to make Black Wallpaper or a Gray Bed. You rank up as a Craftsman by fulfilling the townsfolk's Contracts: requests for a specific quantity of a given tag or a single item with sufficient points in a given tag. This gives you lots of options - if they want 40 Cute, you can give them 20 Bows that are 2 each, or make some Cute Dressers that give 8 each. The former uses Fluffy, the latter uses Wood. Maybe you just cut down a lot of trees, maybe you just grew a lot of Tricotton that's Fluffy and White. There's options. The fishing is good. "JRPG needs fishing" -Yoko Taro, 2017 It's Stardew, except the farming is "just" the easiest source of Grain, Vegetables, and Fruit to make Alcohol, Tofu, and Jam that you feed into an ancient machine to make punch cards. It's Terraria's progression ladder, but rather than combat you're building machines to process Mushrooms into Plastic to make Rubber Ducks. It's Slay the Spire, only the card-and-energy battler is a full minigame inside the main game. (It's a perfectly cromulent example of the genre.) It's Microsoft Excel... plus a robot with a cape. I'm checking so many boxes and all the numbers are trending upwards. Negatives: -Townsfolk dialogue is a pretty shallow pool. You'll catch repetitions early and often. -The UI's a bit clunky. There's no option to move items in quantities between "1" and "maximum", and by the end you're going to have three-digit stacks of things. -1.0 could have maybe used another month in the oven or another few beta testers. Nothing vital - you can beat the game and only a few items/achievements have issues - but a few missing/broken things that grate on me personally. Positives, beyond what I already implied: -Despite what I said about townsfolk dialogue, they've got distinct (if one-note) personalities and funny writing. The titular Last Craftsman, Gary, was a standout for me. Just a total jerk you want to dunk on at every opportunity. -Dopamine. Researching a new item with the exact tag combo you need, or finding a way to craft some new tag, feels fantastic. It's a treadmill, and by the end you really do feel like you've progressed in your ability to turn things into other things. The tag system is really good for that and I'm amazed I haven't seen anything like it before, because it feels fantastic despite not being THAT different from a standard game crafting system. -The dev's super responsive. I made a lot of posts on the forum with specific issues and look at that, they're all fixed or about to get fixed! What a coincidence. Seriously, game's good. I like to check boxes and progress through things and it does that. I regret neither the money I spent on it nor the time I put into it, and that's high praise coming from me.

Want to play another farm-fish-fight-craft game but tired of seeing the exact same mechanics over and over? This is the game to try. The tag system for crafting, researching, and fulfilling requests makes the standard gameplay loop a lot more flexible and fun. There is no repeated rebuilding of all your hand tools with increasingly unlikely metals. The deckbuilding game in the dungeon's good and definitely an improvement on the usual combat in this genre. And I actually like the fishing minigame. There are certainly places where the game could use some more polish, but it's a one-person project. I love that the dev has put so much work into parts of the game that are often totally ignored in games that have a ton of people working on them. The titles and descriptions for the different contracts are a good example. They're unnecessarily fun! The little jokes and references make me smile. (I'm also a big fan of having the neighbors tell you to go away once they're talked out rather than be weirdly silent. Just like real life!)

A great twist on the Stardew/Harvest Moon/Rune Factory genre. For me, it does a lot to differentiate itself - this isn't a "farming game", but rather a game with farming in it. The deck building and turn based combat of the ruins melds well with the rest of the game, and the gradual automation and industrialisation of your production line is compelling and seemingly ever-expamding. The tags system in particular I find extremely compelling, and allows the crafting system to be a lot more open, and for you to find a lot of surprising uses for different ingredients. I haven't engaged much with the "social" aspect of the game, but the characters seem distinct and interesting enough. I'm surprised this game goes under the radar as much as it does. It's an incredible effort from a solo dev.

The controls are a bit wonky (controller) but once you get past that, the gameplay loop is really fun!

A novel twist on the stardew style cozy game, while the crafting is the main focus, all the subsystems are pretty fun and, best of all, your default move speed is pretty damn fast! Story is cute, music is great, graphics are great. Highly reccomend, perfect type of game to hop in, play an in game day, and then hop out feeling satisfied.

Good game, have enjoyed my time in it so far.