Sprouting Depths

Edit: I have since gotten one of the endings. Kinda lost near the end of the 2nd one, but the rest of the review still stands. My only criticism not already covered is that the basement zone is both the scariest and most difficult. In the other areas, it's almost impossible to die so long as you pay any amount of attention, and it also isn't especially scary compared to the basement. The next scariest monster is in the zone right after the basement, but it hardly shows up and isn't much of a threat when it does unless it appears right next to you. TL;DR: Fantastic exploration based indie horror game with fun dungeon crawling mechanics and secrets and puzzles to unravel paired with oddly cozy vibes at times. Get it if that sounds good to you, but it's scarier than it may initially seem. First of all, this game is criminally underrated. I initially checked it out because I saw it was made by the same developer as Cellfish (also an amazing game with somewhat similar cozy vibes and horror themes), and I was not disappointed. This is very much a horror game, but I have never seen one like it that combines these mechanics this way. It's an exploration-based dungeon crawler farming sim horror game, essentially, and there's a bunch of secrets to find. The general gameplay loop from what I've done is that you get a request from Fren (yes, that is the lizard guy's name), you go into the basement dungeon to gather seeds, give Fren the seeds, and receive an item from it. The difficulty of the requests and the variety of things you can make expands as you go, as you'll have to go deeper into the dungeon to get different resources, putting yourself at greater risk of being killed by the various creatures found in its depths. Dying is also minimally punishing. It sends you back to the surface with any tools you had and you drop any resources on you. These resources cannot be recoverd, as the dungeon changes every time you enter it, so you'll have to go foraging for them again. The risk/reward decisions carry more weight the further you go, as you have more inventory space to carry more things and therefore can lose more things. If I had to give any criticism, I would say that the basic controls could be explained more in-game. Instead, I found out that I even had an inventory by chance, and same with using items. These button bindings are found in the keybind settings, but they really should be covered a bit more in the tutorial. Would also love if there was controller support since I know someone who would love the game, but has issues playing with M&K due to carpal tunnel. The controls should be simple enough to make it possible, but I understand if that isn't something the developer wanted to add this late after release, especially since the game hasn't received much attention. Finally, a couple of personal nitpicks: I think the basement area should have more lanterns around since it is presumably the most used area and the first area that players are introduced to, to better get players acclimated to the game and further differentiate it from the mines. Also noticed some weird infrequent lag spikes from time to time that I'm pretty sure are related to areas loading in, but honestly not entirely sure. These don't really damage the game experience at all, but are minor personal issues that I think would be cool if they were addressed.

It was ok, not worth 10 USD tho as it was really short. Solid on sale however, like I bought it.