Artificer: Science of Magic

I wanted to like this game it seemed promising so I picked it up during early access. The game feels very unfinished and I somehow soft locked my progress with not investing my gold in the right crafts before making a discovery, I've spent literal hours exploring looking for more gold that would be accessible to my character. There have not been any updates since the cartography update, and the game definitely needs a bit more polish.

Gameplay and story is quite simple, but boy, is it original. Using science and MacGyver skills to understand and bend an exotic word's magic to your will is a great concept. Decent artwork and awesome OST create a fitting, weird, alien atmosphere. Weirdest crafting tree I've ever seen. But in a good way. Expect the unexpected. Gave it a second playthrough after a two-year break and still liked it.

My thumb is an expression of the fact that *I* enjoyed playing it. You'll have to read the review to figure out if you'd want to. It's basically Thaumcraft + Don't Starve, except you're not in constant threat of dying to random seasonal bosses or mismanaging your resources. You can still die through carelessness, but if you think about what you should do to not die, you'll mostly not die. The combat doesn't feel great (much like Don't Starve), but it's not awful. Much like Thaumcraft, progress gets exponentially harder to make as inevitably every step forward entails retracing several other steps you've done before to make components for the forward step. However, those faults aside, you get to crash land on a hostile planet and be a spaceman who discovers magic and follow a research tree through diligent exploration and experimentation. If that sounds awesome, this is your game. If it doesn't, it's probably not. I did have a bug where I couldn't continue the main quest due to the geography deleting itself, but I joined the discord, asked what's up, and had instructions to fix it and had actually fixed it in like 5 minutes. It's apparently infamous. Really, it's a game I very, very much wanted, but it's not as deep or long as that game. It does check all the right boxes, but it's like a 10 hour game and I wish it was a 100 hour game. Not because I think every game needs to be 100 hours, mind you, but because nobody else has made this particular game yet and I want to play it for a long, long time. It's a game that scratches an itch you didn't even know you had unless you played Thaumcraft in Minecraft.

This is a heart felt review as there are many nuances involved with enjoying and appreciating what this game is all about. I got this title on a massive sale, like $2.50 CAD, and that's about the same price for a half decent tall can. It is fair to say I got more 'joy mileage' out of this game than I would have gotten out of a tall boy, and I do em. As other reviews have highlighted, the art in this game was a draw for me, and I enjoyed exploring the illustrative world presented by the developers. Some of the mechanics are clever, like the xeno-fauna autopsies. Other mechanics are straight up boring and grindy and I question how much time the devs spent play testing and getting honest feedback from players before deploying this puppy. The thing that makes me like this game, despite its flaws, is the heart that I feel went into this. Making games is hard, and to have put this entire package together as it, well... there is a show of work that is clear, and what can I say... this game is so unique. I almost feel that it deserves a revamp, as the world is quite interesting, and I would enjoy exploring it in further depth if the game play were more enjoyable overall.

I love the visual style but the research system is abysmal.

Интересно,очень интересно, еслиб не фармили то было б интересно, а так очень интересно

The options menu (and sound volume) isn't accessible as soon as sound starts. Ow my ears. There's way too much exposition before getting to any gameplay. Why is "Skip Dialog" on the ENTER button?!? it's nowhere near normal hand position, and not rebindable? Why does me character go crazy blurry when moving (especially in the ship)? The animations are over exaggerated, these together making my eyes hurt. The overexaggerated animations take a really long time, and items are large amount, making it feel like I'm wasting time doing nothing. Mouse wheel used, but not to zoom in/out?? Button zoom janky and slow. There's forced exploration at the start, but no map, meaning you can get immediately lost. HOW DO I GET PAPER??? Why do I have to examine every single leaf before being allowed to interact with it? I feel like nobody actually play tested this. The most important part of the game experience is the first 15 minutes. The "hook". This game fails so spectacularly at that, I don't even know what to start saying. It actually trumps Skyrim's forced copy of a modern warfare intro that is totally at odds with how the game plays. Then goes on to provide an awful intro experience. I'm not even moaning that there's an unskippable intro while starting up the game (a pet hate of mine), because the rest of it is just so bad

This game is very buggy and there are some things that are not explained well, there is a specific crafting system in this game called enchantment that is absolutely flawed in many ways more then one, if it takes me 2 hours to craft one item despite having every material for it and that item being one of base items of this crafting system there is a large problem

I really wanted to like this game. It has a great premise, set-up, and intro sequence, a fascinating alien ecosystem to explore, and a (mostly) believable magic system. Literally everything I could ask for. But none of that means much when the gameplay and story are so disappointing. In my opinion, the lackluster gameplay would be mostly forgivable if it was my only complaint. The main problems are obscure progression requirements, unexplained combat mechanics, and a seemingly unintentional cheese for the "boss fight". The two biggest failures in the gameplay are how easy it seems to be to softlock yourself out of a required progression pathway (which I managed to do twice), and how frustratingly slow progression is. Admittedly, I've chosen to interpret the latter as intentional to give the player a "realistic" impression of actually struggling to survive on a completely unknown alien planet. It was still annoying to deal with. It's the abysmal story that has me not recommending this game. There's a lot of setup with absolutely no payoff. Simultaneously, there's a big climatic ending sequence with no buildup [spoiler] in which the main character ascends to become [i] a god of magic[/i]. This comes out of [i] literal nowhere[/i], and there's no clear reason why (or how!) the main character does this[/spoiler]. Because of this, the story has no real closure, and is singularly the most unsatisfying end to a game I've played in years. Not to mention an incredible amount of other worldbuilding that goes entirely to waste. It's evident that this game had a much more ambitious scope than what we actually see in the finished game, but the gameplay and progression is too unpolished to support a longer game. TL;DR My thoughts are best summarized by what I told my friend when I finished this game: "It feels like I've only finished the prologue, but I'm kind of glad I don't have to play it anymore."

I love the overall idea of the game, the way a purple hair dude just crashes on a planet with a talking dog.