I Am Future: Cozy Apocalypse Survival

Tiny builds needs to stop trying to crank out so many games. They have an interesting idea or mechanic, make a concept game around it that has a lot of potential. Then just never see it through. The EA is always so fun and promising, then they just rush the final product and move on to the next game. I'm done.

I deeply enjoyed this game during it's early access phase, I thought there was going to be SO much to the game, then one day randomly they dropped the 1.0 - SUPER excited to finally see the whole game, only to be left sorely disappointed. Half the roofs that were 'coming soon' never did, the storyline abruptly ended as if it was wrapped up as quickly as possible. While saying all this, I sunk some serious hours into this game and I did enjoy playing it, I just felt it could have been so much *more*.

I have been following this game loosely for years now, and while I had never committed to playing the game until recently, it always kept me interested just from the theme and concept of a cozy survival game. I will say, I really enjoyed the first bit of the game, but when I got to the later half of the mid-game, I realized this game simply just wants your time, and not in a good way. The loading screens take forever and the game stutters when you enter or exit just about any menu. Now, these things would be fine on their own because they aren't intentional or anything, but when you find out you have to wait almost 3 in-game days for raw materials to craft, and then proceed to need to wait 5 more in-game days for different raw materials to craft, it really makes you appreciate the sleeping mechanic, but it still takes forever especially when you have to stop to eat or refill generators or the like. Overall, it just slows to a crawl and sucks the fun out of everything that was vaguely fun in the first place

It's really not that cozy, it's more like a janky mess, I really wanted to like this game, and I came back after some time when the 1.0 came out. This game is a mess, it's full of minigames that are really fun the first 10 times, than you realize minigames is all there is in this game and you'll be doing them every time you want to gather resources, which you'll need a lot of. [spoiler]NPC movement is really bad, you'll find your bots wandering around and getting stuck into things. They really take away all the little cozyness because there's no easy way for you to see what they're doing and what resources they're missing, and when they need resources and can't find them they just stop in a random point when they really should just move to the next task.[/spoiler] The story so far is generic and boring and the dialogue is bad.

This is a good game if you know what you are getting into. It is not heavy on survival mechanics and doesn't have a particularly engaging story. This is a game to play after a long day while listening to music or watching something in the background. It is one of those games where you go into a zone without needing to engage your brain too much. The basic gameplay loop is one of breaking down items to get resources, using those resources to level up your equipment so that you can break down more complex things to get rarer items to get even more upgrades. Breaking down items, opening up new areas to clear and gathering resources can be very satisfying. If you go into this expecting to progress quickly, it will be too much of a grind and if you play it for too long, it begins to become tedious and frustrating due to the slow progress (as I found out the hard way). But if you play it in small bursts when your brain needs a break, then this game can be fun with a satisfying loop of watching areas slowly clear as you break down all the junk and use the resources to build better stuff. It does have some performance problems, including some lag and longer and longer loading times the more you play. My gaming laptop also ran a little hot. And sometimes, the game just won't close - it hangs while shutting down and you might need to use task manager to get it to close completely. The inventory management is a bit tedious and the minions (little robots that help keep your stuff organised) are not as useful as one would hope, needing a bit more micromanagement than I liked. The game does offer nice options to customise some gameplay elements, such as disabling parasites from eating your crops so that you can make it even cosier. Recommended for people looking for one of those "turn off the brain and go into a zone" games.

I'll be honest. I really wanted to like this game. I just don't. It claims to be a cozy game... but instead it's an unfun grindy mess. You need 100's of basic resources just to get out of the early game, and until then, the only way to get these are to go on daily expeditions (where your reward is 3-6 base resource per day) or fishing, where again, it's 3 or 4 piece of base resource. SO you end up spending DAYS sleeping, fishing, waiting and repeating over and over and over again just to unlock enough base resource to advance. And then once you advance... guess what... you get to do it all over again, but now for enough resources to make the next tier of base resource. It just doesn't scale well, and is boringly repetitive. What should be a fun cozy survival game ends up being a sleep and fish simulator (and a not very good one at that).

I was enjoying this. Though the game still has bugs and has been abandonned by the developpers.

As sad as I am to do this, I can't recommend this game as it is. The title promised a "cozy game", and while the start was great, it ended up being an experience so frustratingly stressful due to how clunky storage, and automation has been, as well as some design decisions that make very little sense. The early game is the better part of it: you explore, discover, disassemble manually and fight against threats that would prevent you from surviving the ordeals that loom upon you: a critical lack of food and health. The more you go, the more you're encouraged to make use of different tables, and crafts that use all the things from your disassembling endeavors. This is where the game shines the most, because of how the world around you can be actively used for progress. However, the more you go, the more you realize that the game has scaled too much from its original goals: storage doesn't work properly, is laggy when switching from chest to chest, robots don't detect some storages properly, "trash storage" isn't counted as storage for some reason (and is the best storage for single items in the game), so you can't quick stack your items on those from any chest/crafting table or robots do not insert items in those... There are a lot of weird, frustrating quirks in how everything is done, where some items can be crafted instantly, but some others require you to make giant machines that take ages to make a single item. Some crafts require 3m30 to make ONE item, where crafts can require you to have upwards of 20 of one, for one repair/craft! And of course, upgrading the machine you make them in... does NOT make the crafts faster. So what do you do? You make more machines! Well, tough luck, you have very little room to do so and you need those items to bridge the gaps between places for power. Speaking about power, another example would be the recharging stations, where those take more room than any other machine in there, but somehow requires you to build it early on, on a roof that has very little space to move and do so. Smaller stations accomodating one robot each would be much better suited for the early point you get those, rather than those gigantic wastes of space that prevent you from automating early on. About automation, there's some of the issues I talked about early on, but there's also very little the robots can do, especially early on. You have to unlock quite a few of their capabilities, and even when you do, you need specific upgrades to the tower to get their better ones. So by the time that you ARE unlocking them, you'll have done all the painful work that these would've helped a lot with. There are also some weird things related to the controls: this was designed with a QWERTY keyboard in mind, so rebinding some of the movement was possible, but some of the UI can't be reassigned. For example, "Q" by default is "Move Left" and "A" is "Previous Tab"/"Turn Camera Left", following the QWERTY design. But if you reassign Q to "Turn Camera Left" and A to "Move Left", the "Previous Tab" bind stays at the QWERTY "A", so "Q" in the AZERTY layout! As much as I want to recommend this game out there, it's riddled with issues from its core design to the small details, making it hard to truly like without having to suffer all kinds of caveats by design. Which is a shame, because at its core, this has the potential to be a really fun and cozy game, with tons of somewhat educational ways to disassemble items and teach how to salvage parts from things that seem to be completely busted in the first place. But in this state? I'm sorry, this is not a fun game, especially in the later stages where storage and damage repairs become a chore rather than the promised cozy survival.