Edit: * I'm editing my review to reflect my enjoyment of the game.*
Edit: *Animals die. That's a real turn off for these cozy games. What about death is cozy? I don't want to play a game that has cute animals and a happy vibe...only for those animals to die...*
*Something I really like. The tracking arrow. I can put it on and follow it without needing to open my map a thousand times to figure out where an npc is. It's very helpful in the beginning when you're not familiar with where their homes and businesses are and don't know their schedule yet.
I'm not sure about them just standing around certain spots, doing nothing, after business is done. They don't talk to each other, that I saw, or move at all. The people that wander around during the day are better. It seems more natural when they stand places because it's not a bunch of characters standing in the same area doing nothing. They also look like they have reasons. Like the guy on the mountain looks like he's looking out at the view, and the person that visits your farm looks like they're checking out your crops.
You get two rows of inventory and a bar to store tools not being used separately. This is so much better for early game. You can forage more without having to run back to the farm to drop things off as much as other farming sim games.*
The mini-games. Most of them are fine...repetitive when you have to do them to level up that specific part time job. *It is kinda funny you run a farm, forage, fish, mine, run errands, and still have part time jobs.* Others are just...bad. I can't stand the cooking one. The recipes go by so fast and the order of ingredients to pick is never in the same place, the images are tiny and trying to pick the right ones in the 5 seconds the game gives you to complete the recipe is crazy. I can do three items ok most of the time, but more than that and with such short time and no chance to memorize order on repeated attempts, I always get 'your cooking skill is too low and you did bad' type ending. Sure I get money and xp, but if I stress so much playing the minigame that it stops being fun, what's the point? It's no longer a game, it's a chore. Leveling is pretty slow, even with the update? I get 20xp and that is like 1/4 of the bar for just the first level. I'm not sure how many levels there are, but if it's the same minigame every time you play, that just is mind numbing. There is no option to skip the minigames either, so if you don't care about completing the game it's fine, but if you want to do all the things it's a real pain.
You don't get all the starting tools right away, which is fine, but I just don't know if I'm suppose to buy a fishing rod or not, since I got the hammer on a different day? There's no guide telling me, and no info in game, just random mail in your mailbox that may or may not be part of the main story and give you needed items.
Road to nowhere. There is a road northwest in town that leads...nowhere? I mistakenly go up it every time I'm out foraging and it goes to a loading screen and says something about you not wanting to leave the town actually... why it's there I have no idea, but it's frustrating that it doesn't just say you can't go that way, or is blocked until it may be used or something...but no you enter and have to have a loading screen and get spit back out, a good 5-10 seconds wasted...every time I forget that this is the particular road that does that.
Edit: *There's a passing out mechanic, but it's very brutal. You don't just wake up tired the next day, you get sick and have to go to the clinic and pay to get better. There is now an option to turn it off in the game options menu, which is great in my opinion. You have a fire place too that you have to remember to light the first 10 days of spring and all of winter or you have a chance to get sick as well. I'm sure I'll get used to it in winter, but it's hard to remember the first spring. If you forget to turn the fire place on you catch cold and have to go pay to get better.*
Selling animals... I have yet to get animals, but on the discussion board someone asked how to sell their chickens, and there is no way to do so in the game currently. No way to make room if you filled the barn/coop and then unlocked another cool animal. Does that mean you just have to buy more barns/coops and try to make sure you have space if there's another cool animal unlocked.
Edit: *Crafting. It takes energy. This is a very energy hungry game. Most of these games are like that early game, energy management is hard and you are limited by energy so have short days, but I've never played a game you spent energy crafting, even though crafting happens when you aren't even at the bench...it takes time. So energy and time are sunk into crafting. One or the other would be better. If you want to clear some trees then cook a meal to replenish energy you better hope you have enough energy left to cook or you just have to go to bed and skip to the next day.*
Mining. When I go down levels it takes more hits to break the exact same rocks as on earlier levels. I don't get new or different items dropped from the copper node or the amethyst node, so why do I have to hit it even more the lower I go? If it was new rocks I would totally understand they were harder, and if I got different materials I'd understand that, but they are still copper nodes, no matter the floor they are on they shouldn't take more hits than when you first discover them. Every few levels it takes more and more hits just to mine one copper and I really don't think that's a very fun game mechanic. I have no reason to mine floor 11 if I can get the same materials for a lot less energy on floor 1-4.
Edit: *They nerfed the selling price of ore, when it's already hard enough to get money early game. Late game it doesn't matter since you're super rich anyway so I have no idea why they would nerf the sell price.
They also increased the amount of stamina needed for using tools. It takes 910 points of energy to water ONE plant.... I mean what kind of crap is that? TEN points of energy JUST by using the watering can once?! I'm pretty sure it's meant to be that way, since leveling up farming it took 9 instead at a certain level maybe level 2 or 3. I found you HAVE to do the part time jobs. I got lvl one at the forge and it gave me 5% less energy used which would mean it's 9.5 energy used when you reach lvl 1.
The save feature. It's nice you can save anytime if you buy an in game item, but there is only one slot so you save over it each time. It seems an ancient game mechanic that shouldn't be in any game that comes out in 2025. Maybe I'm spoiled, but sometimes I make mistakes and want to go back to a different day, and that's impossible in this game. Even being able to go back to the day before would be nice. There's an option to shut off saving at night, so I guess you can save before you do something big, if you remember, and go back before it happened.
If you run out of room and something falls on the ground you can't carry if you leave it's gone forever. Like other games that leave it until you pick it up, or until the next day or something, you can't leave the current area. You can't run to your farm and drop off items and come back to pick up anything. It's gone once you load another area.*
Like I said, the dev is very active updating, and when I posted about a bug I found it was fixed within an hour or two of me posting it. That's pretty impressive in my opinion, and is half the reason I changed my review to positive.
