Mirklurk: Every Step Matters

Here’s my experience: You walk outside, but stop every 2 seconds because your turns are used up. You can’t walk normally because of that turn system. You will start tripping over your own feet very soon. You need to rest very often, but will forget it mostly. You spend the days collecting wood and searching for stones. You’ll need them for the night. Your biggest enemy are the nights. You see nothing, you barely can walk during night. You need a torch, but you lack ingredients. You can’t find any in the dark. You wait. But you can’t sleep without fire. You must rest (not sleep) and end your turns by pressing space. You do that for a while, finally sunrise. You go around trying to get some loot. You turn every rock around in order to find stones. You found 5 stones after looking under 80 rocks. You are hungry, you must hunt enemies for food. You find a snake, you barely survive. You must press space after each hit, because of the ungenerous turn system. You avoid enemies from now on, unless you need food. You get lost on the map. It gets dark again. You try to remember where you dropped all that wood. You can’t find it. Every spot of the map looks the same. You wander around in slow motion (darkness!) and hope to find your camp. You try to cut another tree. You don’t see nothing anymore. You spam click around, hoping to hit a tree. You find your way back to the starting fort where the merchant is. You carry nothing of value. You want to buy repair kits for your equipment, but can’t afford it. You venture forth, crafting meaningless and weird items, collect mold and bugs. You trip over your feet again, it got dark. You start a fire with some twigs. It burns for a few seconds. You can prepare some food. You eat 2 snakes and 10 bugs, your saturation is up to 70% again. You forgot your sleeping bag at your last camp. You can’t sleep without it. You can’t find it. You see it starts to rain. You can’t restart the fire because all the wood is wet. You wait in the dark. You want to play, but night does not let you. You leveled up by sunrise. You desperately need traversal skills, as this is the only thing you do. You invest in that. You feel no difference. You seek for loot, you fall over your feet. You have now crafted enough weird stuff to buy something. You can’t find the fort again. You can’t figure out where you are on the low fidelity map. You flinch because it gets dark again. You don’t like nights, they make up 50% of the loop. You manage to get back to the fort. You buy the repair kits. You use them, aaaand they’re gone. You spent 2 days to afford them, but they are one time use only. You repair 25 durability of your 100 durability axe. It now has 75% again. You can use it for a day longer now, then you must use a day or two to afford repairing it. You feel like you play an 80 year old man with a broken leg, collecting dirt and eating vermin. You sometimes kill a snake or find a stone on the ground. You craft a twine when you need a feeling of achievement. You juggle items in your limited inventory for a good chunk of the day. You spend your few hours of daylight chopping wood. You repeat the process on the next day, but can’t hold enough items to make a journey. You need the whole day to sustain yourself for one day longer. You feel like this is leading nowhere, after a couple of days you feel no progression. Your real life is stressful enough, but at least there you know how to walk. You know now why the subtitle is ‘Every step matters’. You decide to let it be.

CON: Spelunking is painfully tedious. A fun killer. I don't wanna draw the map of caves and dungeons with physical pen & paper. I'm sure there are some hardcore gaming fans who enjoy such thing. I ain't one. PRO: Combat mechanic is clever. Game runs well except few minor glitches.

The game is fun, in its own way and it is worth the asking price of almost 10 Euros. Having gotten this out of the way, some feedback for the developer: a) The game is on the easy side of things, if you figure out how it works. For example, noticing that the dungeons are randomised and that the loot you find is also randomised, can lead to "save scumming for better loot or a better dungeon seed". This option must go and the loot and dungeons could be randomised as they are now, but not be reset with its loading. (it is technically possible since once the dungeon is rolled and you interact with it and you save in it, the game saves that dungeon and does not reroll it ever again) b) Bows are impossible to use in dungeons making the skill tree options for them, irrelevant. c) Some skills are also hard to fathom investing on, like the firestarter. Just buying that axe from the mage practically gives you +15%, which means that you get 5 points on that skill for 2 and a half silvers. d) Waiting for my character to get a decent weapon and then investing 10 points in the relevant skill, really trivialised the combat. It makes you an instant powerhouse. That is not bad, since you take a risk of not really leveling up anything for ten levels, but it does mean that most of the other skills are comparatively not really worth bothering with. e) Wellbeing is somewhat inscrutable. Can you die from bad wellbeing? What does it do, other than affect potential bad rolls in walking and actions? f) There is no reason to explore most of the place. I got most of my equipment by dwelving in dungeons in the first area and in the second and apart from the main quest, the game is empty. Sidequests are needed and more content on the maps (random places of interest) and loot. Enhancing the crafting options and implying that finding new materials will unlock new more powerful crafting options might do the trick. g) Maybe some gates/teleportation might be a good idea as well. Coming back from C4 to A1, just to be told that I had to get to E5, when there is nothing of interest in between, was a bit of a bummer. A teleport stones solution, at least in the main quest (like those summoning stones), would resolve that, without trivialising the balance that the player needs to strike between weight of equipment and size of storage. I will walk to E5 because I want to finish the game, but if I could just teleport back to C4 and proceed from there would have been a massive QoL improvement for the main quest. h) At some point you get to become a "torch manager". The ability to later craft lanterns (I found one in a random loot. Very cool!) might be a good idea. And that's it. Great game otherwise. I love the combat system and the survival style and the whole thing is very cool Keep up the good work! :) Other than that, it is a great game

I had the privilege of finding a bug in the game where you basically become invincible by being SO BAD at the game. Despite being so incredibly inept at the game, it has been an absolute blast and I have since become at least adequate. If you love survival games with enchanting art styles and good music, this is the game for you. It's a complete refresh of the genre in my opinion, giving it unique and new mechanics that make it interesting. Moving forward in the game feels like a genuine adventure where you have to seriously plan and hype yourself up. Also, I would recommend joining the discord. Mattias (the developer) is incredible active, and there is a very supportive and active community there working together to make the game the best it can be. It is also where I learned I was the one to find the "wow you are bad at this" bug.

So, I'm sort of split between whether I'd recommend this game for two reasons. You have to fight the UI and there are many frequent bugs. For example, you have your main bag, pouches, crafting and equipment all with separate UI boxes. You can freely drag them around - great. The problem is they often forget their positions (resolution tied?) or don't open as you'd expect, so you’re scrambling to have the right boxes open at the right time. They independently take priority over the escape key too, so if you want to exit, you need to hit escape 5 times. There are a few things like this. There's also hotkey inconsistencies, like swapping weapons, exploration modes etc. Some seem tied to when it's "your turn" which seems unnecessary and clunky. Bugs are frequent (for me, every few minutes). They're rarely game ending but are annoying and can put you at a disadvantage. For example, getting stuck in different exploration modes, so you need to kick the UI by disabling/enabling modes. Other things like needing to click on buttons twice (UI needs focusing first?). Then there's getting stuck when rafting and not be able to start paddling, so you have to get off into the water and back on. Also duplication of some items (fire pit) and I had a few hard crashes …. anyway, you get the point. There are just generally a lot of inconsistencies throughout the game, like targeting of objects in the environment etc. The frequency of these bugs would be obvious to the developers, which worries me whether they are not easy for them to fix (spaghetti code / vibe coding etc) or whether it was released into EA haphazardly. Despite all this, I did REALLY enjoy it - which is annoying! I do actually think there is something special here if the developers are willing to invest the time. So, yes I do recommend it, but with certain qualifiers.

ENTIRE game is use up your AP to walk, end turn, repeat, that's a terrible idea O.o

The game is really well thought out, but I will have to say I agree with the guy who complains about the caves in reviews. I am genuinely stuck on Journal Entry 25/26 because I can not get past the Skaalmyr caves. I brought 8 torches and it still was not enough for me to get through the entire place. After all 8 torches burned out, I was just touching the wall trying to figure out where I was and somehow exited the caves instead of going further in somehow. Despite the review above sounding like I dislike the game, it is the opposite. As you can see, I was willing to play the game all the way to the 26th Journal Entry, the game is really fun just challenging. One thing I would love to see is a customizeable game settings option. For example, when creating a game, you have a game rule slider or the ability to change things within the world, like how much fog of war there is in caves.

Slow burn even on Easy, due to heavy rain and slips, but very fun and satisfying survival mechanics. 44h spent on just this version of EA and I still haven't done Journal Entry 25 (constant distractions with looting and selling, hehe )

Dying from swamp ass has never been so fun.

Truly a hidden gem. Undoubtedly not built for mass-market appeal, but that's what makes it so good to those who are attracted to this kind of thing - its unyielding commitment to its design goals. The art work is beautiful, the gameplay is delicious, and the mechanics are unique and deep. If you like punishing, slow games, I can't recommend this enough. It definitely has some polish that needs to be done, but the dev is active, consistent, and listens to feedback from the community. These are the kinds of games I want to see being supported by the community more.