There is the skeleton of a game here, massively kneecapped by a lack of decent guardrails to prevent very frustrating circumstances.
Firstly, to make this game even playable, I advise you to recommend turning off ‘drop inventory on death’ as you will die a lot from fall damage.
Secondly, shelve any per-conceived notion of getting a dragonfly and flying around because this game employs an arbitrary stamina bar to any mount that might fulfill that fantasy, which is very strange because any grasshopper you get will immediately invalidate the choice to nerf flight as it can jump across the whole map.
Third, the mechanics for interacting with your “companions” is… baffling? Tamed insect friends will fight for you, level up, and generally be mountable, but if they die, even with the ‘your companions are immortal’ setting turned on, it will be a slog to get them back up. You will try a revive stone, or you will try bringing them back to your home, and re summoning them, which is a fairly costly procedure, eventually you’ll realize ‘revive powder’ is the intended answer, making a lot of the other methods… pointless? But if you haven’t yet gotten to a point where you can make revive powder, a lot of this can feel rough, with little/zero explanation.
But it doesn’t stop there. The main method to taming an insect is to incubate an egg randomly dropped by said insect. Incubating the egg summons a wave of that insect to come and absolutely trash your base. There are traps you can build, and they do work, however, because they work well, the game was “balanced” to make them about as annoying to set up as possible. Firstly, they aren’t constructed like any other part of your base, they are ‘crafted’ and then you ‘deploy’ them, which has you waiting for a good two second. This is a huge ask when you want to set up 20 of these guys, it’s going to be a minute before you get your spiritually disappointing insect companion.
Next, if you HAVE insect companions, they will desire nothing else then to BULLDOZE through ALL of your traps, destroying them, and dying in the process. Only for some reason, death by trap falls through some weird balancing crack and is seen as… the player killing the insect? So your insect friend will be gone for good, regardless of the settings you’ve turned on/off. The obvious answer might be, tell your companion to stop moving, which you can do, but your insect companions have this very annoying trait of wanting to stand juuuust far enough away that talking to them means walking towards them, which then has them walk away from you, probably into a trap.
It STILL doesn’t end there, if you die, your companion will hang around for a little bit, and if the thing that killed you was a big ol’ mantis, they will then cut through your companion, which is generally ok because they will just end up ‘knock out’ but at your base, but sometimes it just bugs out and your insect companion is knocked out… somewhere? Up in a branch? Do you remember where you were? Good luck!
And FINALLY, there is this ‘petting’ mechanic, wherein you MUST pet your insect. You are morally and mechanically obligated to pet your insect because there is a ‘petting bar’ which fills up when you do, and if you don’t pet them, the bar depletes, not quickly, over a long period of time, but don’t forget about this completely mundane mechanic because if that bar empties your pet will just… leave. Great. Thanks.
That’s a lot of frustration to contend with for the mechanic that, I would argue, was the draw for this game. But how is the game otherwise? If you turn off a lot of the mechanics that add to the slog-factor, like crafting taking real time, losing your items on death, you end up with a fairly generic RPG where you wander around collecting materials, beat up some bugs, collect materials, craft some items, collect materials, build a house with copious crafting benches, collect materials, organize your chests, collect materials, organize your chests because there’s no ‘deposit similar items to nearby chests’ button, collect materials some more, eventually fight a fairly generic boss for an NPC, maybe finally make some better armor with your materials, and then repeat that process.
Leveling up is a thing, you can do, for some reason, because, I have no idea. You earn points you spend on your attributes, but the difference those points make are laughably diminutive. We all had a good chuckle when placing a point in ‘vigor’ resulted in a 1 point increase to our maximum health, rounding it out to a respectable 101 HP.
Combat is fine, and feels like homeopathic Dark souls. You can dodge, block, swing your weapon, combo, and parry. But also, parrying is so quick you can almost spam it, and kind of makes combat very easy. This is all fine, and forgettable, but also doesn’t really amount to a game I can recommend.
