Haven & Hearth

Old game that is extremely difficult to learn. But you have fun while doing so. Highly reccomend a tutorial!

EDIT: Rewriting because in retrospect it was pretty rambly and not super useful as a review. I've played for more hours than steam suggests, so bear with me. This game is strange. It is a vastly different experience depending on if you're playing solo or with other people. Speaking for myself, this is from the perspective of a "Hermit," or any player that just strikes out alone. There are two big appeals to this game: The big leaps of progress are the first hook. Going from being able to make new thing after new thing. Going from drying hides to leather, letting you make some beefy inventory upgrades from backpacks, to putting together a kiln so you can do all sorts of things with pottery and clay, to growing crops that enable all kinds of things, most importantly being fine fibers like flax and hemp and grains for bread and straw for a few miscellaneous things. Basically: Getting new things. The second appeal is the big test for sticking around. The numbers game, raising qualities through all their individual means. Digging around the world for good clay and water nodes, growing crops and trees in cycles to develop their qualities, eating food to improve your core stats that influence how well you can use qualities, digging into deeper levels of the underground mines for better rocks for better core tools that lets you make use of better animal carcasses. Basically "Number go up," but I'd say the biggest appeal to this is thinking of it as expanding what you can do. You aren't gonna kill a bear unless you've got good weapons and armor, which require good metals, with good tools, that need good wood and good skills from good clothes and strong stats from good food. Some of the game elements are very, *very* long term. Hides taking 12 hours to dry is on the reasonable end. A tar kiln taking a full 7 RL days to cook into charcoal and tar sounds like a tall ask at the start, but the average tree taking 7 days in themselves plus requiring many cycles makes any shorter feel trivial. That isn't to say the *entire* game is a slog, as the longer term elements only need to be attended to for a little bit. There are ungodly amounts of generic q10 trees around, you're growing trees to make higher quality stuff, and planting only takes like a couple minutes, it just also need a lot of preparations like having good soil and water and an herbalist table to enable the final product to come out well. And at the side of the core game, this is an MMO. For better and for worse. It all takes place on one big server. The world is huge, and can support many players. There are benevolent folks that are open to helping out an up-and-comer or give a nice item that to them is outpaced but would be a game changer for you. As a Hermit myself, I simply haven't interacted with the cooperative elements that much. There are servers and organizations out there, just trying to talk to folks to get into things may be the best in. Having someone to explain the game would be a big help, and a lot of the more tedious elements can be spread throughout an organized village. I personally just like to play at my own pace and not worry about expectations or treading on grounds other people are in charge of. That's just your usual social tradeoffs though. Same difference as striking out alone in any other MMO or joining some kind of guild, just in this case its got the weird survival-not-survival gameplay tissue instead of dungeon raids or something (Which there are dungeons in Haven and Hearth! One reason to care for getting good at combat) At the same time, crimes are possible. How crimes are built are designed to require a lot of investment to pursue them, and your defenses against crimes are very strong. Having a Palisade, those big wooden stake walls you see all over, makes you practically immune to common rabble, as it requires breaking the "peace of the realm" and using a scarce resource to build the ram that is required to shatter a Palisade wall. Even assuming you play for several months, there are much juicier targets out there, so nobody's gonna break your base because they want your things. Unfortunately spite's its own motivator, so you just have to go beneath notice. Don't show your location, try to settle away from rivers or other common walk-bys (Planting your base right by a localized resource like Pit Clay is just asking for trouble. Don't give people an opportunity-cost reason to get rid of you). If you're as generic of a random hermit out in the wild as possible it's very unlikely someone will bother with the whole process. I can't give super good advice to avoid trouble because I've simply been lucky. Only had one bout of thievery, and that was from the mistake of playing early on a new world where a lot of people were at a stage of progression where yoinking your study desk was of any degree of usefulness. Some folks get much unluckier and get messed with and turned away from the game. It doesn't feel good, and areas vary a lot in hostility since you don't know how aggressive your neighbors are. Again though: If you're cautious enough to try and settle away from existing people and away from commonly travelled areas, obscurity will carry you far. Worry more about the core game. Making Alt character is quite easy though, so definitely consider keeping your main behind walls and sending out crummier goons to risk getting killed by some murderhobo. Dying is a rough setback if it's your core character but a big shrug if it's someone was just supposed to be "Good enough." --- Don't know how well I've sold this game's concept. I say just try it. It's free, very unique concept. Probably would go down easier if you looked into some more info online, maybe some other video about the game. I get some good satisfaction out of building up from the ground and pushing farther than I've managed in the past. I get burned out eventually, but with how long the game's been around for I at some point get an itch to come back.

Un juego al que adoro peeeero, acabo de descubrir Life y feudal -arden, lo he jugado un par de horas y tengo que decir que es igual o parecido de complejo, en español, primera persona, mucho mejor sistema de combate, buenos graficos y me he cambiado. Lo siento

NO YES NO YES I DON'T KNOW I CAN'T PLAY THIS ♥♥♥♥, WHY IS SO ♥♥♥♥♥ DAM LAGGY ??????? I CAN PLAY DESTINY 2 BEST GRAPHISM, I CAN PLAY CALL OF DUTY ON MY PC, I CAN PLAY ANY GAME UNLESS THIS, PLEASE BRIGHTEN ME WHY. IS. THIS. ♥♥♥♥ SO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DAMN LAGGY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!???!???!?????!?????!!!!!????!!!!!!!????!?!?!?!???!??

This is an old classic that still engages me today. Haven't played it for years, and coming back I still enjoy the challenge. Perma death isn't for everyone. Maybe that's just me, for some reason while I want to play more casual games the difficulty games bring me back. This does it in a very clever way when you know what to do. Definitely one of the most engrossing and intricate games!

It's a decently fun game. I was able to put almost 500 hours into it over the course of about 5 months, so I'd say that was a lot of entertainment from a free game. I simply got all I wanted out of it and stopped playing. It's really charming, has a fun art-style, and a neat world, but there are quite a few pros and cons if you want to play: PROS - Highly intricate crafting and construction systems with a lot of customizability. Buildings, paths, and objects can be made from a huge variety of different types of wood, stone, metal, etc to create fun aesthetics. - There are a lot of things to do and a lot of different skills you can focus on if you want, which I found fun. This is better if you are playing with friends so you can be the village tailor, farmer, cook, etc. - Practically every item and object in the game has a quality score which is determined by the associated skill you used to get it, the quality of tool you used to get it, or both. The higher the score, the better effects it will have when used to make something. Food made with high score ingredients gives more stats, higher score metals make stronger weapons/tools, etc. This pretty much infinitely scales depending on your stats which can let you make very powerful and potent things. Later in the game, you can complete quests specific to a certain profession that give unique bonuses to things you make associated with that skill. - Running off the last one, your stats are primarily determined by food. Certain types of food give certain stat increases. Eat enough food that increases a certain stat and that stat permanently increases. This also infinitely scales, though the higher your stat gets, the harder it gets to increase it. You can make many types of food that focus on increasing one type of stat, varying based on ingredients used. If you are the village chef, your friends will love you. - Harvesting farmable fields, chopping a bunch of trees, butchering animals, and many other activities in the game are satisfying once you complete them. - Despite being a free game from 2009, the developer still churns out consistent content updates anywhere between every few days to every few weeks, which I find pretty admirable. CONS - The longer you play this game and the bigger your village gets, the more it becomes like a part-time job that you need to frequently tend to. Animals need to be fed frequently or they die. Plants need to be harvested or protected by compost or they die. Your village claim deteriorates if you're not giving it learning points. People may be trying to invade your base. It all becomes quite a hassle eventually and something you need to be ready to check on several times a day. If someone wants to raid your base, they need to set up one of the siege engines that takes about 20 hours to ready itself, and if you don't catch it, that's your base gone. - Since the game doesn't really end, eventually at least one person in your village will probably get bored and stop playing. Depending on their role, this can be a huge detriment if you lose your high level cook or farmer. - To lead off the last point, PVP seems to be the game's end goal once you get strong enough and have good weapons/armor. While that isn't a bad idea, if whoever you're fighting decides it, they can kill you after they KO you. The game is marked as having permadeath, so this isn't a complaint, but unless you can retrieve your corpse afterwards, that is about 80% of the character's progress permanently gone, including stats, skills, known recipes, objects, combat maneuvers, etc. There are certain rituals you can perform to get some of these things back by giving objects to a statue repeatedly, but this can range from needing to find a pinecone that you already have a million of, or one specific type of fish halfway across the world. - The world reset back in December of 2025, and introduced the 16.1 world which caused a large influx of players consistently online. Now, 5 months later, there are hardly 100 players online in this new world, and with how gigantic the world is, you will rarely see anyone and the world feels very desolate with dozens of abandoned bases and such. - If a village gets big and powerful enough, it can become a realm which essentially claims a huge chunk of the continent it is on, and can allocate bonuses to anyone living on that land. This also creates a kingdom chat which anyone in the land can talk to each other on, as there is no general or global chat. For some reason, there are a lot of lunatics on this game that will talk nonsense in the chat or just be a general nuisance. There is a block function, but it seems to only work when it wants to, and if they just make a new character, then that goes around it completely. - A major part of the game is accumulating learning points, which you get from studying certain items in the game by putting them on a study desk and waiting anywhere from a few hours to a few days for it to finish. You can spend learning points to increase your skills, but they are also needed to maintain any village claims or personal claims you have. If the village claim runs out of its allocated points, it starts to deteriorate, and once it does so fully, anyone can enter your claim. While this isn't exactly a bad thing, similar to the animals and farming point above, it forces you to make this game a part-time job to frequently log on, gather your learning points, put more things on your study desk, rinse and repeat. - There is a lot of waiting. Like, a lot. I can only assume it is a progression limiter so a faction doesn't become OP overnight, but waiting upwards of 7 real life days for your crops to be harvestable, days for objects to dry on a drying rack/herbalist table, days for other things to progress can be annoying. In the new 16.1 world, wait times have apparently been drastically improved. I can't imagine how it is on the 16 world. - Progression is a mega, mega slog once you start out. Depending on how many people you have playing with you and how lucky you are where you settle, it can take weeks, if not months for you to progress to obtaining and using metals. Again I'm sure this is a progression limiter, but it is still frustrating. - Quests can sometimes ask for a highly specific item that is only found in 1-3 of the dozens of biomes that exist in the game. You might walk around for several real life hours and never once find the biome you're looking for. Even if you do, your exploration skill may not be high enough to give you a chance to find the item itself, which I found a bit silly. Overall, if you can get together a few dedicated friends to consistently play this game with, it's a good bit of fun. Though it will inevitably become a part-time job you need to manage.