Void Monsters: Spring City Tales

This game has a lot of issues. It lacks polish. There are quite a few bugs, some preventing you from finishing quests, some places you'll get stuck, some areas/screens never get dark at night, some monsters are unobtainable... Too many chests to lockpick, the minigame gets old after a few dozen times. The rate of random encounters is high, you fight between 1 and 5 enemies and the chance of fleeing feels like 33%, resulting in sometimes having to try 4-5 times before succeeding and having to wait for all the ennemy attacks in between. It gets really annoying after 10-20h. Leveling up the monsters is long and grindy, crafting is nice but has a % chance to suceed (as low as 5%) which is just a waste of time in the end because you'll be reloading until it works anyway. I found a good chunk of the monsters to be ugly and the combat lacking depth and sufficient different animations. The game has a prominent lack of quality of life and visibility of information. There is no minimap and the area maps are items within a very long list of possessions without shortcuts, the inventory is a mess. No bestiary. You don't see enemy life bars nor their type, nor if damage is efficient... I disliked that some areas were only accessible as part of the main story. It is fine overall but i was very underwhelmed when i realized that by focusing on repaying my debt not to have it get out of control and to be able to take my time playing i effectively just skipped most of the adventure/plot because you get to face the end boss immediately. That didn't work out too well anyway my team was ~lvl 18 and he is ~38 so i had to postpone the encounter through reloading and leaving what i owed at a few hundred. I started with the negatives because that's what stood out more towards the end, i wasn't having much fun for the last 10h due to the repetitiveness and the tedium. However i did enjoy the first 25 and this game has some qualities too. I enjoyed that the farming aspect is really not central and very accessible. Even though there is a day and night cycle here you don't have to sleep and plants grow in minutes. The world map is nice, feels alive and is cleverly designed. People walk around during the day and not at night (streets/roads are empty), your actions impact the economy of the world (prices/interest rate). I really liked that houses are numbered and the location of quest givers is written in the briefing. It was refreshing to get mail every day with random requests for help from villagers, participating in giving a sense of community. I liked the monster summoning system which is based on finding runes and not capture. Levels even though impactful were not as important as it seemed at first since i managed to defeat arena opponents at double of mine. I didn't feel like i was in a rush to do stuff and racing against the clock except in the beginning where you try to keep the debt from growing exponentially and have very limited means of income. The main thing tipping the balance to the positive for me is that this game is 5€. At 15 i wouldn't have recommended it but this is totally reasonable and fine value.