Recent reviews by everythingexcepthavefun

Genuinely one of the most painful visual logic puzzles to track where the logic doesn't exist and is inconsistent on the direction of movement between panels.
I don't know what kind of comics the devs read but you don't go diagonal midway through the page before you reach the rightmost side. On top of the game just deciding to do whatever it wants despite the fact it goes against what was already established.
Half the time you don't even know where the character will enter into frame so it's just a guessing game with same face syndrome where you'll accidentally repeatedly place the wrong panel in the wrong spot and half to wait through the entire play again and getting impatient and messing up because you're getting impatient.

Genuinely didn't need to be this convoluted.
Genuinely didn't have very much fun playing this.
The art style is great but that's about it.

When I played the demo for this game, it played incredibly similar to Forager.
Not just in the art style, but the gameplay.

And after playing the full game, I can say there were a lot more similarities than I would've liked, but maybe that's just the limitation in this style of game.
You complete objectives for cosmetic rewards, you slowly automate the collection and manufacturing of resources, you have a 4 direction skill tree prioritizing different aspects of gameplay.

A couple things I find strange, or rather am not completely sold behind is not needing resources the more you level up. A grind which plays incredibly similar to forager. I guess except you have to actively play the game to get xp, where as in Forager you could idle for it.

If you really wanted to, you could just unlock farming I, and just place a lot of farm plots and plant the water producing plants, and just spam collect them constantly for xp. The game gives you a pretty sh*t amount of xp for just about anything so the only thing worth your salt in xp grind is farming which is incredibly tedious.

Maybe you get xp for your drones and bots from completing things like you would otherwise but leaving the game on and coming back yields no results.
This is incredibly slow and there isn't much to do during the down time. All you do is wait and spam farm plots for xp. In Forager there were dungeons and puzzles to do in the mean time. This game doesn't really having anything like that. At least from what I can tell.
I've only got 6 Islands unlocked, and haven't started plastic production yet.

They've got the museum which is a collectathon. Where you need 5 of each item, regardless of how tedious one item may be to get compared to another. I like Forager's abundance based collection system more, where the easier it was to get an item, the more of that item you had to give up. It seems uninspired to make each item needed 5.

As well as how many objectives are more rooted in tedium rather than merit. And all the rewards are just a head replacement so you can't even equip more than one at once. It's quantity in something redundant. It's really boring. If this is the full game, and nothing will be added in the future, I wouldn't recommend this. But this review is a thumbs up with the assumption there is more to come because what's here is boring.

Edit 1:
I've played the game more, and have progressed into the "end game" of manufacturing computer parts. Which if I may add is incredibly boring. The thing that slows me down to a crawl is being unable to fit enough buildings on islands. Resources spawning and consuming real estate, resources spawning randomly rather than specific ones needed.

The game is incredibly tedious, at this point. I don't understand why bots have to be told where to deposit items. The yellow bots that transport items see which storages are marked for certain items, yet the gatherers or whatever they're called are too stupid to evenly spread resources.
In addition to the fact that the further a construction is from the bot antenna, the more neglected those buildings get, as well as the fact that the yellow bots are too stupid to load packages into large furnaces. There is a clear automatic priority to hike less important resources that don't need to be constantly attended in lieu of more pressing matters. And switching buildings around doesn't fix this issue, because now it's the other way around.

I don't want to constantly move buildings around or sort storage depots manually because the yellow bots are too busy. I had a system where the depot marked for delivery for gatherers isn't marked for the yellow guys to store that item there so they hike it out of there. But they're too slow and the system doesn't work the further you get into the game. The bots are incredibly lazy and prioritize what's closest to them.

And I don't understand why lubricant makes refineries and assemblers work faster, yet there is nothing of the sort for electric furnaces. I run out storage for sand, I don't cook glass fast enough, I never have enough bottles. It's infuriating to me, even after placing 16 furnaces just to smelt glass, and then 16 more to smelt bottles, that it was faster to have less of both of those because the bots were being stretched thin trying to deliver more sand into the furnaces or glass into the furnaces.

Which, let's talk about that, they only deliver resources one at a time, or rather, enough to make one at a time. It's really slow. If you can mark how much of that item you want to make, rather than having it only make it indefinitely when maybe you only need 12 of that item at the moment, or other things where you can tell how much to take, how much to deliver, or having it automatically do so.

It's so tedious. It doesn't have to be.
And the thing about placing buildings is that you can move through them. Even with the flying mount, you can't fly over the water, you still have to jump, and even then can't jump over buildings. I have created one way gates out of furnaces and transport arms. I literally cannot traverse freely in my island because you can place buildings on top of each other and create hitboxes much larger than they should be.

And another grievance I have is how unintuitive the solution for the chameleon tower puzzle is. You'd think there'd be an obvious answer in what the color coded biome hints refer to like things exclusive to those islands, but the fact is there is nothing exclusive to each island, or if there is, there's more than one. I would've thought it had something to do with plants or flowers but no one of them is just a rock. A rock. The solution to the puzzle is a rock. Why? because you find it in abundance? because the crabs on the island eat rocks? Then why was the solution for the mushroom zone a mushroom and not a water orb? There is so much inconsistency with this solution that it's annoying. Why is some of them flower, and other them not flower. They're all resources sure, but based on the multi colored leaves under the chameleon boss, my assumption was that it had something to do with multicolored plants.

And like maybe it had something to do with finding an item that matches the color of the biome, but then why is the plains biome a berry? other than the hog and bees eat berries. It doesn't make any sense. The jelly fish don't eat mushrooms. I haven't even seen the sand lizards eat the cactus flowers they ate the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ crabs for bones. Long story short, it didn't make ANY sense. And what exactly was the point of the RNG dragonfly fish puzzle in the desert temple. It was just a hang-man like guessing game. I don't think it would be that difficult to create a memory based puzzle or something. Right? Or even just environmental where you place a hidden solution somewhere in the game and you go and find it and solve the puzzle? Or even better yet, the classic make all the icons light up but pressing one activates the ones next to it? Or even like a simon says where you have to repeat the icons of the animals back correctly and having multiple rounds to complete.

There was I'd say a lot of better approaches that could've been taken.
I also feel like the whole space integration is somewhat of an after though. I don't want to deal with any of it. Realistically because it's genuinely a tedious and painful matter. Everything hinges on steel production, which hinges on iron and copper smelting, which hinges on charcoal manufacturing and mining, which hinges on the gathering of sticks. The face you are forced to still use the basic stone furnaces for ores other than steel is really slow. What's the point of an upgrade if you can't integrate old technology? It's like apple removing the headphone jack.

Despite the fact you don't need resources to build buildings, you still need resources to craft items in furnaces despite the face you don't in the workbench.
The game seems to be picking and choosing where certain-

The humor of this game is very back and forth between a 'tongue and cheek banter,' a 'matter of fact cynicism,' and 'breaking the 4th wall apathetically' It's hard to get behind and stay behind with how back and forth it is from clever and stagnating. Also trying to activate dialogue or rather trying to find what activates it, the density or sprawl of the narration is inconsistent.

I find the placement of integral items to be very skewed because you can't get very far without freezing to death, and as a first time play, the location of whatever unlocks a bypass or a workaround for this cold is unclear. Not to mention that for certain "plot important" blueprint unlocks from picking up unique items keep the silhouette in place making it seem like there is something still yet to be collected.

I am stuck, unable to figure out where the thing that unlocks thermal protection is. Or at least I'm assuming that's what it is because I can't really thoroughly explore the fright side of chapter 1.

I can't reach the glass because I die on returning with it. Time passes while in your inventory menu.
Time passes while in the crafting menu. It's not even like as you're crafting time passes, time passes while you try to navigate the menu to find what you want.

The suitcases are finicky. You can't place them where the outline shows they'll be. Bumping them with your character sends them flying, emptying it's contents, and requiring you to empty the rest to move the suitcase back where it was. The physical model of resources don't match the size of the inventory it takes up, and suitcases and resources that are placed, jump up and shift around causing the storages once again to get jumbled about dropping items.

It's hard to see the game getting any better when its ultimately fumbling around in the darkness until dialogue appears. If this is just the first chapter it would've made more sense if it was more compact if it's a tutorial level. But it's quite honestly annoying to get around. I don't know where the coffin master key is. I don't know where the accelerator upgrade is. I don't know how I'm supposed to get glass without freezing.
And I don't understand why a suitcase is considered a storage if it isn't also portable given suitcases are designed to carry stuff inside of them.

cant wait till the official release.

There are many bugs, not as many as Fallout 76 did on release, but it is clear once again that very little went into playtesting.

I'm just gonna say two things,
1.) Unknown or Incompatable ID's for ingame resources, when called return a missing no and will crash your game or just softlock you. If you choose a certain color for your ship your ship will despawn. If you craft certain resources or combine certain resources they will not stack, they might fall through the floor if you drop them, they might not register correctly as the resource they are called.

2.) Traveling is kinda meh. It is clear what they had some mechanic of needing to refuel your ship which got removed at some point with how much dialogue there is about this non-existent mechanic. It's kind of stupid that you can't move your ship a little bit without leaving the planet. And equally stupid that you can't see where the different points of interest are on a planet so you can land near one. You can't call your ship to your location if you find a dock or landing pad on a planet. You don't have a cart or mount you can ride while exploring the planet, it's all on foot which I'm totally cool with but most people are impatient. Fast travel is a lot slower than you'd think it be.

These two points are ignoring all of the legitimate oversights in gameplay from inconsistent movement speeds, jank stealth mechanics, item weight inconsistency, what counts as stealing, items floating, npcs phasing through walls, items levitating and clipping through walls, items spawning behind invisible walls, skill objectives softlocking and being unable to be completed, other quests and objectives softlocking and being unable to be completed, bad map geometry, procedural generation clipping of environment and structures, and many many other bugs you can find in any old video about this game online. There are many bugs, there are many problems, there are many oversights.
I haven't even completed the tutorial because I wandered off into the sunset and got lost. I don't have the best/latest graphics card. I also game on a laptop. But saying that, the game runs relatively well, despite multiple stutters during combat or loading a new area for the first time. The same cannot be said for my peers as well as most other people who cannot run this game due to poor performance. This game doesn't seem to be very optimized. With all the steps they took to minimize this issue, it clearly wasn't enough. This game isn't worth 70 dollars. It's honestly more along the lines of 50 if not less. Genuinely needs a lot of work, I wonder how long it will take them to patch out the bugs this time...

I hate the fact you can't loot everything despite the fact you should be able to do so such as items getting stuck in spider webs and being unable to be knocked down in any shape way or form. You can't target the web string holding them up, and the ethereal hand companion can't even pick them up either despite the fact it can fly.
Why would they even spawn in an unreachable place, despite the fact I just watched my character grab a pair of boots through a wall and even clipped through a celling to grab painting off a wall down below.
What you can and can't loot is insane with how inconsistent it is.

Plus a lot of things break if you try to shoot them down so it baffles me.
Even stacking crates doesn't work sometimes even though I literally used this method to get to places I softlocked myself out of. Unbelievable.
It's like skyrim and it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wheel of cheese that spawns behind an invisible wall.
What a disgrace.

Instead of lowering the price, fix the blatant gameplay bugs and issues the game has.
My game, softlocked, my computer, and I had to restart it TWICE.
The first time I was still stuck on the frozen screen of the game.
This game eats up so much Ram it doesn't make any sense.
I have everything on the lowest settings and it still chews through it.

This game softlocks, A LOT.
A LOT MORE than other games NOTORIOUS for SOFTLOCKING.
If I idle on the pause screen for too long my game will freeze on the menu screen but I can still unpause and move around and play the game blind.
If I alert too many eternalists and they set off an alarm that closes too many bars over windows, it will freeze my game.
Even starting the game up from anywhere other than the library page with the game selected, will crash the game on start-up.
I can't launch the game from recently played. And sometimes even clicking the desktop shortcut will open the game with incredibly delay taking almost an entire minute to even open.

This is not that large of a game.
It should not take, as long as it is, to run.

If you want me to speak about the gameplay, I find it disappointing.
I got this game after completing the Dishonored series 100%.
I expected a similar level of detail when it came to level design, but was disappointed that doors close automatically, drawers and cabinets couldn't be opened, toilets and sinks couldn't be interacted with, and there doesn't seem to be any nonlethal options. (yet...)

This game seems to all about killing with little thought, which I'm sure will change later in the game. But given how slow it is to sneak up on people and how slow it is to lure people away from one another, as well as the infinite ammunition vending machines, I find this a game that is incredibly boring.

There is very little risk, and equally little reward.
Until you get to where you can save items between runs, it's very boring, and unrewarding to do anything other than what you're told. Speaking of which, the dialogue, recordings, and logs are just kind of... annoying.... to witness. Swearing cus you can rather than for emphasis is always annoying to me. Because it just seems unprompted or unnecessary.
I think a lot of people are fed up with this kind of storytelling.
I just think it's strange that you can't force the loop to reset by suiciding.
It forces you to start where you died and I'm not a fan of it.

Not a fan of how the game feels like doing whatever it feels like doing instead of the inputs I press to do a certain action.
Like maybe it's just visually incorrect, because it doesn't look like I'm standing in oil, but I still can't jump.
Or the game being inconsistent on how far you can jump because sometimes with a running start I'll jump two blocks, and others I'll jump one.
So it's this game of wondering if you'll jump 2 blocks away and avoid taking damage, or jump 1 block and take damage which isn't very fun. I don't understand why you would have multiple outcomes for the same key presses. It's like RNG on whether or not you dodge, rather than being unable to jump two blocks if something is in the way, which wasn't the case, ever while I was playing this game.
Like that would also be a strategy to stagger your dodge to avoid getting too far away, but this isn't the kind of game where it takes that into account. You're airborne the same amount of time regardless of how far you jump. It doesn't make any sense. The input necessary to jump just one tile is so finicky. Because most of the time I jump what seems to be less than a block, and the hitbox of a spike is more than a block.

The game also sometimes decides that I wanted to pick something up, or wanted to click on something, even though I didn't. It just so happens that the action button for interacting is the same as the action button for attacking, or rather defending yourself. So even though you wanted to kill something, you accidentally interacted with something and it ate your swing input and you take a hit or you interacted with a hole and went deeper into the mines or dungeons rather than open a chest that spawned right next to it.

Like this game's been out for a while, and man, oh man, did I not miss this kind of game.
The indicators for half the things are nonexistent so it's annoying having to guess rather than predict.
Like even an audio indication of where on the screen the worm boss will appear from would've gone a long way, instead it's just mono audio and it could literally appear from anywhere.
Like, I don't care if this boss is piss easy and I've already killed it three times in a span of twenty minutes.
It's still f*ckin annoying dude.

Get it on sale. F*ck the base price.

I played this game one mute, so I think I missed out on some music and sound design,
This game was recommended to me in person, because I mentioned I liked puzzle games.
Albeit short, this game has charm to it. A poetic kind of narrative, with a unique puzzle mechanic.
Not knowing the timeline of similar games, I don't know what came first in regards to these kinds of games.
But there a lot of them. And if this game started it's roots in 2012, it's come a long way since then.
So good on the people that worked on this game.

You can beat the game in a single session.
There isn't much replay ability but it was nice while it lasted.

Remember seeing the twitter posts of the dev logs.
Finally got the game.
Definitely in the vein of other short but sweet indie titles.
Would recommend if you like stringing ants in webs preventing them from working or even just into lava.