Asbury Pines

As a completionist, I have 100% this game. Unfortunately, I didn't find the speed up toggles in the settings until after I finished the main game, that would have eased some of the issues in this review. I will also add that I play a ton of idle and incremental games, this isn't my first foray into the genre. I think I've played enough of this game to give a full context review. I frustratingly cannot recommend this game, especially at a $12 price point. The core engine is so novel and interesting in the idle/incremental game space and I want to see it used to its full potential, but this game just feels bad to play. I'll try to keep this review mostly spoiler free. Overall, the game just makes me feel like nothing I do matters, both from a story and a mechanics perspective. There aren't any meaningful or impactful player choices mechanically and the story is laid out for you in a way that you can't change. I want at least one of these things to change. The Pros: - Novel and interesting approach to idle/incremental games, I've never seen a game or approach like this and it was super cool to figure out and understand. - I think the art style was really nice and really fits the vibe of the whole game, along with the general UI direction. Everything feels like it goes together and belongs in this game. - Management UX is always difficult to get right, esp towards end game, but for the most part the game felt easy to navigate and update - There are some characters that I really fell in love with throughout the game, the devs did a great job connecting me to these characters even through just these small story snippets that we get insight into. The Cons: - The worst part for me and the part I know won't and can't change is that the story is just draining. It's interesting and intricately put together, but it feels like getting kicked in the shins over and over and over again as you go through it. Nothing good happens for good characters until the end of the game. If something good does seem to happen, you know something absolutely heinous is about to afflict these good characters. The evil characters tend to not really face consequences for their actions except for the occasional humiliating ending. - The game feels bad to play actively AND it feels bad to check in and leave it. It feels like it wants you to check in about every half hour to adjust everything, which is just a weird cadence for me. I felt like I couldn't leave it for too long or the already slow progress would fall to a crawl. - By contrast, all of the upgrades that are supposed to speed up the game take 8-12 hours per small upgrade, like a 5% increase in 1/3 of the types of tasks you're doing. By the time I beat the full game, I had only gotten through half of these upgrades. [spoiler] Even with full level 100 characters, the final Religion unlock still takes 10 hours to unlock, why? [/spoiler] - The game pace continually slows, so none of the upgrades feel like they matter. There's no prestige mechanic, nothing ever feels like it gets faster or like the upgrades you get have an impact at all. - Warning, spoiler for the end of the game! [spoiler] There are so many interesting and cool characters in this game, and the ones that "make it" at the end of the game are some of the least interesting in my opinion. All of their story beats are used to explain the time travel mechanic instead of actually getting you connected to the characters, so when you finally get to a "good" ending the people who get it feel hollow. [/spoiler] I know that editing the end game is something that is on their roadmap for early access, so I hope this will get addressed, but I'm not willing to play through the rest of the game to find out. - This is really a personal one, but [spoiler] I thought there would be a reveal at the end that the interface we're using was actually Petra's work understanding the timeline and that this was a fancy future computer interface or something from Quent and was so excited for that, then it didn't happen. That would have really drawn me into the game in a cool way. [/spoiler] - There's some racial diversity in the game and a good split of both men and women, it seems like the devs prioritized this, but all of the lgbt+ relationships are handled poorly. [spoiler] I think there's a lot of potential for exploring the difference between these relationships in colonial times vs. the far future, but all of the lgbt+ relationships happen early in the game and are demonized in lore [/spoiler] It's like there's enough lgbt+ content to make anti-lgbt people mad it exists, but it's presented in such a negative way as to be frustrating for pro-lgbt people. All in all this game was an incredibly frustrating experience. The bones are so interesting, but the execution falls flat. I feel like some of my issues are too fundamental to be changed. I think the dev team did something really cool and special here though, and I am looking forward to playing the sequel with a new story. I'll come back and check after they come out of early access and have made some of the balancing and story changes they've mentioned on the roadmap to see if it changes this review.

Bought this on the promise of "Twin Peaks idle mystery game," which is was not. If anything, it's closer in scope and scale to 100 Years of Solitude idle game," surprising with a multi-generational story. As a game, this is a bog standard idler with very little innovation. As a narrative tied into an idle game, it's pretty fresh. Some of the later jumps are a little far fetched (sna-hail), but because you're waiting for them, you're invested. I enjoyed my time with it, and probably liked it more in this form than if it were a novel. 3/5.

I don't quite understand the hype for this game within the genre. It certainly has good bones and the idea of an unfolding storyline is quite good; other idlers have tried this to some success, especially in the time-loop subgenre. However, Asbury Pines inevitably becomes a game of scrolling, and you aren't really incentivized from an interest POV to invest in the storyline. A lot of it isn't relevant and more of the "writing exercise" variety, and your interest in reading things kind of dwindles when you're spending so much time scrolling back and forth and dealing with weird artificial bottlenecks in resource production. As I write this review, I'm only midway to an achievement of producing 10 million snails, and I've given up on playing at 1x. Even at 4x, it'll probably be another day before I get there. Resources like hides and plastics are bottlenecked heavily in the late game, and the feature of having resources from earlier ages transfer to later ages seems finicky at best; many don't seem to transfer at all, ever, or only do so randomly. Research times are also a little off. The final government tech, for example, gives an enormous discount to building new workplaces, but by the time you're researching this, you've already built everything, so this doesn't actually offer you a benefit. All that said, I probably would continue playing this if it had a prestige/NG+ mechanic of some kind. It would work really well with the time travel components of the storyline. Alas, no such thing. As a result, I don't recommend this unless it's heavily discounted. A lot of labour went into it, so I understand why the price is what it is, but from a consumer viewpoint, it's a premium price for the genre and the gameplay doesn't fully match up with what you're paying.

Pros: The soundtrack and art are both pretty good. The story is fairly intriguing as far into it as I got. Cons: Gameplay is extremely dull. It lacks both meaningful choices and the pure numbers go up satisfaction that comes from some incremental games. Playing the game mostly ended up just feeling like a chore you have to do to unlock more story than a compliment to it. When playing actively you unlock a piece of story every couple of minutes, which turns out to be a very bad timescale. It is slow enough that you can't really play actively, but fast enough and requiring enough attention that you can't really just put it on a second monitor and let it sit either.

客观而言，除非具备扎实的英文能力，否则并不建议在暂无官方中文的状态下体验本作。本人游玩过程中借助汉化补丁，暂且不评判补丁翻译水准，玩家自发无偿制作补丁的行为已然值得肯定。 我本身同时偏爱放置玩法与叙事题材游戏，本作融合两类玩法，原本让人倍感契合喜好。但实际体验下来，游戏的放置模块趣味性不足。倘若放置玩法的定位是为剧情内容铺垫服务，那么本作的叙事表现同样不尽人意。人物故事脉络零散，不同时间线的剧情关联度偏弱。 查阅更新记录可知，制作团队计划在正式版中调整内容，并上线简体中文支持。游戏整体基础素质尚可，后续发展值得期待，待正式版本更新后，我将重新体验游戏并补充评测内容。 注：本次叙事相关评价均基于汉化补丁体验得出，并未对照英文原版内容，观点仅作参考。 I am fond of both idle gameplay and story-focused games. This work combines the two genres, which initially suited my tastes perfectly. Nevertheless, the idle segments fail to deliver sufficient fun in actual play. If idle mechanics are meant to lay groundwork for the plot, the narrative of this game also leaves much to be desired. Character storylines are disjointed, and plots from different timelines have loose connections. Update logs show that the development team intends to revise the content and roll out official Simplified Chinese support in the full release. The game has decent basic quality and enjoys promising prospects. I will replay the game and supplement my review after the official version is updated.

It's a wild story and how you progress through it is even wilder. As for an Idler, it has interesting concepts of how you progress and use those resources. however, just login to set up some research in a branch and come back in about 12 hours and assign people to new items in the research. About 10 days of "offline gameplay" was spent doing that. watch the timeline progress was very fun to watch and have a few twists here and there. However the story can become "fragmented", so other characters may "spoil" the stories and timelines of other characters.

I really enjoyed this game. It's in early access now, but I think it'll be even better once it has some balancing.

I enjoyed this game a lot. I think anyone that enjoys piecing a story together will enjoy it as well, because that is a requirement - the game will hand you story beats and you need to stitch them together (although there is a 'Quests' menu that will collate things together, but it's.. massive because it encompasses everything from everywhere). Over a 20+ hour playthrough, I understand now why it bounced between eras, why there were so many characters.. and I don't regret the playthrough or purchase because it was, ultimately, very satisfying. The "final" story piece especially was poignant. As far as gameplay goes, this was fine as well. I don't know when they were added, but the ability to set the game speed higher than 1x seems cool, and having the ability to "skip ahead" 4, 8, or 12 hours is neat. I played at 1x speed but used a bit of skipping to get the final achievement I needed to get that was related to resource production. The game is not perfect - there are typos sometimes, graphical problems, but nothing that was critical or game-breaking - but it is actively being worked on. The last developer roadmap post indicates some systems are going to be significantly reworked, and that may make the gameplay experience even better. Long review short: if you're curious, are okay getting a drip-fed story, and want a hybrid playstyle (active to prioritize short-term things, idle for longer researches), this is a great game for the price.

Really good incremental narrative game that spins out a twin peaks style plot into something more grandiose. Pacing is really nice and non-linear storytelling is drip-fed to you through resource management mechanic. Want to know more about a character? Gotta understand the lives around them or sometimes follow something insignificant at a first glance. The way everything is connected feels really neat! If you like unique incremental games, murder mysteries and character driven stories - get Asbury pines right now! PS: Don't use the speed up option until the hunt for 100%

Very cool incremental game. I cannot say much without spoiling it, but while the incremental part is already quite nice (even though it’s simple, it’s well made), the story is really compelling. The start is a bit slow, and there is a lot to read (including a fair amount of purely atmospheric, non-essential descriptions that don’t contribute to the plot), but after a while, the plot starts to unravel, and this is where the game truly shines. There are speed options in the settings: speed increase and fast-forwarding. I recommend not using them until very late. Everything flows very naturally for most of the game, so they are not needed. However, near the very end, or once you complete the story and want to 100% the game, there is nothing to do but wait a few hours for resources to be collected, and that’s where using these options becomes relevant.