Kynseed

I played this game for 30 or so hours when first bought and found it a bit overwhelming, the combat a trifle confusing and the game-play a tiny bit tedious with all the travelling back and forth between places. I started from scratch again a week or two back and have now doubled my play time and found it a much more enjoyable experience. Yes the back and forth is a bit annoying at first but once you find the other 'fast travel' secrets that annoyance evaporates. The game is beautifully drawn and animated and the music is evocative. The humour might be lost on non-Brits and I think you'd have to be of a certain age (aka an old fart) to get some of the jokes but I think it's great. There's a good range of 'quests' and an awful lot else to do. The mini games are good fun and fishing, farming and building are all good once you understand how things work. The folklore provides a great backdrop, with a mix of themes that include nature, relationships and some darker elements. There are a number of well implemented systems for making progress whether it's increasing your combat or cooking skills, earning reputation and perk points for your shops or building relationships. In short, a terrific game that definitely deserves your time, my rating 95%!

I adore this game. I've played quite a few cozy / farming type games by this point, and Kynseed is my favourite. I even think it's better than the juggernaut that started it all - Stardew Valley - which is quite the accolade. Yet it's taken me a while to write a review for Kynseed. I can't quite figure out how to get it into words. What is it that I love about it? The first thing that springs to mind is its sense of humour. It's just right for me. Very British humour. It's had me laughing out loud at times, s♥♥♥♥♥♥ing at others. And there's so much humour everywhere in this game. It's also such a richly crafted game. There's so much world lore, expressed through a variety of mediums - books you can find to read (I recommend actually reading any book you come across in the game), proverbs that are both amusing and helpful, tips or rumours from NPCs. All this lore and the story itself is woven from a lot of recognisable themes from real world folklore and myth, and it all feels very alive and cohesive. If you like fairies / fae (and not all of them the fluffy, happy sort of fairies / fae - beware Fairweather!), references to murky, ominous beasts of myth, gnomes, ghosts, witches, characters from folktales (with the game's own spin), and/or treant-like-creatures, you're in luck. Then sprinkled in amongst all the humour and folklore there are plenty of real life easter eggs. Want Gnome Edmunds with a gameshow (complete with gameshow music, sound effects, and catch phrases)? Got him. A tribe of time-lost roleplayers? Yup. Eun Livingstun sharing his love of Make Your Own Adventures? Check. And those are just a few. Although it doesn't take long to befriend most NPCs (once you've got the hang of the friendship system) and their individual stories aren't that long, they all have a unique flavour or personality, and you get to know them and their life's story a bit. Once you've maxxed out friendship with someone they'll give you a little quest or task, and you usually find out more about why they are who they are, or help them grow or change a bit. It's bitesize-style stories, but with a surprising amounts of depth in not very much time spent per NPC. All in all, the game's writing is just *chef's kiss*. It's clear that the game was a labour of love, and that really shows in the world and the writing. But what of the gameplay, I hear you cry? I expected it to be convoluted and difficult to figure out. It really wasn't that bad. Maybe that's because I've played Graveyard Keeper before; after figuring that game out, no other games so far have seemed as convoluted, Kynseed included. And Kynseed's systems do feel a little similar to Graveyard Keeper's, so if you've played Graveyard Keeper then Kynseed should be easy to pick up. But even if you haven't, it's not hard once you click with the sort of 'internal logic' of Kynseed's systems and controls. One thing I wasn't sure about at first was the mini games. I hadn't realised the game had mini games and upon starting to play it seemed I was finding them everywhere. They were a bit daunting at first too. But actually, with some practice, most of the mini games turned out to not be too bad once you'd got the knack of each of them. I even quite enjoy baking pies in Kynseed now. My only real criticism, if you can call it that, is that the generation system didn't quite hit for me. I do tend to get attached to my player character, but in this game while I liked my original character, I kind of wanted to naturally pass on to the next generation. Without being too spoiler-y, there is a way you can make that happen manually in the game, but I wasn't as comfortable with that method; I would've liked my character to pass more quickly, naturally, on to further generations. I have some ideas of how to speed that process up on my next playthrough, but it's not going to happen naturally on this first one. I have today just got to the point where my character's children are old enough to do chores around the farm and be sent on gathering missions, and now I see how deciding their chores impact the childrens' stats, I like how that works. I just would've liked the years to pass a bit quicker, I guess, and I don't mean daytimes to be quicker, just the amount of years that needs to pass for the child to become the player character to go a bit faster naturally. But that's fairly minor. In discussion on the Kynseed Discord recently, someone suggested that Kynseed actually does generational gameplay fairly well compared to other games that have tried to add a generation system, and it's hard to get right. I've not played many games with a generational aspect, so I don't know if that's the case, but it might be. I'd also like to give a quick shout out for the music and sound design. Most areas have their own tunes and styles, and some of those tunes have really got in my head - in a good way. It's excellent. I would love to see Kynseed get more content. I know it might not get more though, and even if there's no more content to come I really love the game as it is now. I can see myself playing it again, and coming back to it fairly often over the course of years. Despite the fact that some of its themes are a little darker, I actually find it quite cozy. Somehow it feels like a comfort game for me. I bought this game years ago but for some reason have only just got round to playing it. That was a mistake. I can see now I should've played it much sooner. If you've not played it yet but the writing, folklore/myth focus, gameplay, world... any of it sounds good, give it a go.

Jogo tenta ser inovador, me convenceu a comprar ele por isso, mas tem falhas que eu considerei graves e decidi não continuar jogando. Irei colocar os motivos aqui e espero que ajude vocês a tomar uma decisão. Começando por problemas ignoráveis, até o momento em que ficou injogável. Problema 1; HUD: O jogo segue um padrão diferente dos jogos modernos, com teclas estranhas e confusas; Vários itens não tem muita explicação na tela do que eles fazem ou em qual momento eles serão úteis; Várias informações/itens importantes estão escondidos atrás de abas; O jogo não possui um bom tutorial que explique mecânicas chave da gameplay; Problema 2; Grinding: Esse problema não explicarei em tópicos, pois ficaria confuso. Como o grande foco do jogo é em dinastias, cria-se uma ideia errada de que isso será fácil. Romance nesse jogo me parece uma mecânica incompleta, ir em encontros não da absolutamente nada, é um RP. Por outro lado, o casamento é a maneira de você fazer família, e está escondido atrás de um dos 500 livros no jogo, então, simplesmente vão na wiki. Casamento é similar ao stardew, onde você tem tem que ir em um dia específico em um lugar específico, fazer uma quest meia boca pra aí se casar. Para um jogo que o selling point é dinastia isso é um tiro no pé (ainda mais sem tutorial). Casamento é a primeira camada do grinding, por que o filho é a segunda. Antes de começar vale a pena destacar, você pode adotar crianças, mas não viriam com traits dos pais, como pode-se imaginar, então é uma solução para o grinding, mas tira metade das mecânicas do jogo. Já para ter seu filho biológico, você tem que dar um presente específico para seu conjujê e rodar um gacha para o filho nascer. Vale a pena mencionar que nada disso é explicado no jogo, todas essas informações descobri pela wiki, inclusive, esses itens de casamento e filhos são alguns dos itens que estão escondidos atrás de abas no inventário. Aqui que realmente desisti do jogo, durante toda a gameplay, quase 20h no momento, consegui somente 9 presentes de filho, e o gacha não é generoso (se o nível de natalidade humana fosse o mesmo desse jogo, já estaríamos extintos). Vale a pena mencionar, o grind desse jogo é bem melhor em coisas secundárias, farmar relações é muito mais divertido do que no stardew, por exemplo, madeira talvez seja o mais chatinho, mas é tolerável, infelizmente não consegui explorar muito as mecânicas de lojas, empregados e família, pois o jogo tem uma barreira inexplicável nessas mecânicas chave. Outra coisa que vela menção, gostei do combate, nunca vi nada igual, achei uma boa solução para quem não gosta de turnos ou do clássico rpg maker. E também vale mencionar os minigames no jogo, muito legais e bem feitos. Enfim, se acharem em uma promoção, vale a pena, mas pelo preço que está, não. Voltarei no futuro se tiver algum update relevante, mas talvez essa parede de grind + gacha seja grande demais.

I had a lot of fun with this game. It has very unique fighting mechanic, quite a nice story, fishing, farming, owning a shop or 12 shops... I would love if it expanded further with its mechanics, like better and larger dungeons, improved shop/npc management, time skips forced via story so you actually have to use kynseed and its not just there in the background while you finish all the content in your first year or two with your first character. Addition of having options when speaking with NPCs would be also cool. My point is this game has everything you would want in a small package, cool minigames when crafting, adventuring to new locations, discovering more and more of this interesting world but I still feel like it could be better, even if it was improved via paid DLC. But even as it stands, I recommend this game if its on sale for less than 10 bucks.

I sadly cannot recommend this game. I bought this in 2021 when it released, refunded because it gave me motion sickness. It's been 5 years, I imagined that would be fixed but whenever the camera move you can see individual pixels snapping. This causes me to get motion sick within 20 minutes of playing. A shame really, the game seems fun

I'm addicted. There is so much content still and I'm 68 hours of play time in.

好玩，很有特色，画面很好看，人物很丑，除了感觉这个献祭还是太邪门了。。。