Arcane Vale

Good in theory. Bad in practice. Needs to have EA slapped on it and some patches from feedback and it'd be a good game.

The difficulty feels so random. The slime was honestly one of the hardest bosses so far-even harder than enemies that come later-because of how the attacks work and your stats when you might first encounter it. Durability is extra annoying in this game for a few reasons: - If you buy a new weapon, the current weapon still exists. - It is mostly better to just buy a new weapon so that when your current one breaks, you can switch. (In terms of cost effectiveness) - Once broken, the current weapon seems to cost the same to repair as to make a new one, so unless you have upgrades... - Some items seem to be unable to be repaired? - If you sell the current weapon, the weapon still exists in the shop and doesn't seem to disappear (30 days later, my broken axes are still there). - Some items deplete extremely quickly. The game is extremely buggy, especially on the steam deck where name input is bugged, so you have to do extra work to change your name. Some spots cause you to teleport for no apparent reason, hitboxes are annoying when you watch your attacks go through the enemy (not a miss or dodged or blocked, just doesn't seem to hit at all)-especially annoying at lower bow levels where you already get a lot of misses, dodge, and blocked (the arrows also pass through on misses and dodged). Crops are a pain because they are sometimes randomly unable to be placed-sometimes going into and out of the menu will make them work again, sometimes you have to leave and re-enter the area, sometimes you need to move around to a different angle. Not very clear on what to do. I get that you are expected to learn, but what is the sprinkler range? How can you tell when there is no real indicator to tell you that a crop is watered? You find out by losing the crop due to not being watered. Looks like you can lock yourself out of quests. One can be locked out of if you aren't prepared ahead of time (ie. have already looked up the solution or restarted), have bad luck (glitches), or otherwise cause the quest to fail, potentially before you even receive the quest. (There are supposed to be fixes for it, but in some situations, including in the case of a glitch, you could still potentially lock yourself). I hate the lighting options. You basically get to use a temporary light that you need to farm to craft or buy, a placed object (that requires string to craft), a hat that slightly extends your vision range, and an off-hand light that slightly extends your range. The hat means you can't use other hats. The off-hand light means you can't use a shield or a bow or any other two-handed weapon. Fortunately, the shields aren't that useful anyway once you get the iron sword and find iron to upgrade and then repair it with. It isn't clear what items drop on destroy and what items are destroyed on destroy. Where is the save button? Does the game do continuous save? Does it only save when you quit the game (the only time the game tells you it will save)? Again, not very clear. Inventory management is horrific with no craft from nearby chest options and no chest labeling. Combine this with key items not being consumed when they are no longer needed, items that probably have no use, but are rare enough that you don't want to risk it, and other such items and your inventory gets cluttered with keys and other items that have no more use. The game feels incomplete with some items seeming to do nothing beyond being sellable items despite some potentially having very valid usage. (Seeds that can't be placed even though it would make sense, for example). Given how long it has been and how some of these issues have likely already been reported, I doubt we'll see any updates.