A Merchant's Promise

It's not fun after the first few hours. Check all the other positive reviews: They have played for 3-4 hours and never touched the game again. Such is the case for if you yourself will buy this game. The concept of a walking simulator isn't terrible but it just isn't worth £8.50 to walk between a couple of locations with no other gameplay mechanics than a tedious collecting system of herbs/mushrooms in the wild. There's also a trading stall mechanic that just isn't worth caring about as well as furniture but it's really just not my type of game. And clearly, it's nobody else's either based on the reviews. Don't buy the game if you'll get bored of walking. Because that's what the game is for 90% of it.

Do you remember how, in Skyrim, when you're designing your house and you had to VERY CAREFULLY move every little item because one slip of the mouse sent them all flying and then, when you returned to your house the next time, they were all over the floor anyway? Add a stamina meter that goes down the longer you hold an item and then make the house a physics object you have to move through the world and you have this game. I wanted to like it. I really did. I wanted a nice, chill, walk from point A to point B merchant simulator. What I GOT was an infuriatingly janky physics engine that results in me spending 4 hours to walk one km because ♥♥♥♥ falls out of my wagon every 10 steps and I have to sit down and rest for 30 seconds after each item gets put in because I'm too tired to lift it up again. And then I reach a hill that I simply cannot scale (forget going up at a zig-zag) and I have to empty the entire cart out, carry each item to the top of the hill individually, bring the cart up, and spend another half hour trying to load it up again. It's just SO frustrating. And that's when the physics "works". My most recent play session (and the one that finally convinced me to leave a review) ended with me loading the entire wagon up for 15 minutes and then everything literally just FLYING out in all directions. It's one of the few times I've ever legitimately rage-quit a game. There's a whole laundry list of things that I think would be minor improvements (mostly) that would make things better. A better physics engine where stuff didn't vibrate and explode every so often, a way to rotate objects in a coherent way instead of on some bizarre 45-degree plane that, itself, rotates, the ability to pull your cart a bit better, the cart itself not catching on the ground, the wheel brake engaging by default when you detach from your cart so it doesn't roll into the ocean and become unrecoverable while you frantically try to catch up and press E on JUST the right spot like you're hitting the X on a mobile ad, the lack of a meter that depletes as you try and pack your damn cart up and forcing you to keep having timeouts that double the length of an already abysmally long time standing in one spot slowly lifting items into a cart. I don't know. Maybe this just isn't the game for me at all. Maybe I'm not the intended audience, though I can't imagine who would be at this stage. Maybe in the future some of these problems will be addressed. At the time of writing this is an Early Access game and I'm sure that coding a physics engine from scratch is no easy task. So, as frustrated as I am with this game, I don't want to downplay those caveats. I also don't want to discourage the dev(s) from continuing it. But I really feel like, until the physics engine is working smoother, all other content and updates should be secondary. This is like adding more content to a Platformer where your jump command only works 40% of the time and, even when it does, it's a random height. Without that core foundation, the rest is irrelevant. I will most likely come back to it in the future and see how it's doing. I hope, at that point, I will be able to change my review, but only time will tell.