The Last Craftsman

This game is so good. I play an ungodly number of farming and crafting games; i just like to collect materials, upgrade tools and build up my production. From Stardew Valley to Satisfactory, to the more niche littlewood and Robert on Earth, circling around to Moonstone Island and Dinkum and My Time at Sandrock and all the lands inbetween. I am obsessed with this genre, and I do not expect to stop being obsessed with this genre. With that established: This is a shining gem among crafting games. I'm not even terribly far in, despite the high hours while I was working. Among the more indie branch of the genre, it's a shining example of smooth gameplay flow. Screw the tool wheel and hotbar entirely; they'd just hold you back, and are replaced by your omni tool. The crafting is smoother - you need to build something outta wood, it doesn't mean you need the resource 'Wood'. You just need some stuff made of wood to tear down. Ditto for metal, stone, gems... the crafting is made very smooth with the tag system and I'm very impressed. The mods/upgrades for the tool are so well handled, research unlocks are fun and interesting, inventory management is great, just... I'm not sure I can fully explain how smooth and intuitive it is, making the game very fun to play. The tool needing you to be on mode-3 to interact with things/people instead of being context sensitive is the only thing I'd really ding it on, but you get used to it very quickly and the highlighting when something is interactable, but only with the interact tool active, is brilliant. Five stars do recommend. The farming is very VERY simple and very much not the focus, but if you like crafting games this is my strongest indie recommendation for the year. It's friggin' good!

This is actually a really cleverly put together little 'farming' game. It's got new angles on most of the standard farming sim fare- from the 'dungeon' being a cardgame played through a map of rooms, to the tag system making everything you do weave together, to the multiple approaches this game allows you to take to accomplish near any of its goals. You still can easily do every kind of gathering/production, at least thusfar in my gameplay, but it still feels like you can more or less just flow from day to day and not worry -too- much about if you're doing the 'right' activity or such. The only thing that is bog standard for the genre is the way you interact with the townsfolk, but other than that it all feels fresh and nice to play through despite having played many similar games in my time. It's not a terribly difficult game, but it has plenty to do all the same and I can recommend it as a fun indie gem of the genre. If you like the genre, but want a new angle on it- or if you want to try the genre out for the first time, this is a solid buy.

Classical case of "I should like it, but cannot". You interact with stuff via mouse cursor, which is invisible most of the time and also wanders off when changing screen / location. When using controller, there's an irremovable (and useless) sidebar that blocks part of the screen, including useful data such as the energy bar. And why do we need an energy bar in 2025? I guess the good things would appear later, but I am already tired fighting the UI.

The Last Craftsman takes the verbs of games like Stardew Valley and My Time at Sandrock and pushes it in an interesting direction more focused on crafting and automation. As stated in the game's description, the main gimmick is that crafting is done via tags instead of strict recipes, so a table doesn't care whether the wood comes from fine lumber or sawdust. The challenge is in determining how to best progress when considering what you can grow or harvest. For instance, many recipes require the generic METAL tag. Iron bars can be smelted, but is often more valuable for their IRON tag making recycling scrap metal (from the world or dungeon) a better option. It's always enjoyable to feel like you've gotten one over on the game by "solving" a tag. Tip: try figuring out what different foods and drinks do. Most of the tags have a unique buff and some of them are paradigm shifting. The cons are that inventory management can be cumbersome (missing some QoL features like craft-from-container) and there are a few bugs and crashes due to being an early access game by a solo developer. You might also be disappointed if you're specifically looking for the social sim elements of Stardew Valley as those are de-emphasized (which is a plus for me).

I've been really enjoying this game. It's not your standard farming game fare - your path to advancement and making money is more about solving requests from townsfolk than just selling off stuff. This is especially true because everything in the game has tags, and those tags are at the heart of the crafting system. That means you want a wide variety of objects, and while in many games something like fishing would just be for money, here fish might let you build machinery or furniture, or color wallpaper. There's also a card battling gameplay loop that is quite fun, and presents a risk/reward where you want to get as much stuff as possible so that you can make more things, which you can then feed back into the deck to make more things to tackler further difficulties to make more things to expand your infrastructure to be able to funnel more resources to then... But yeah, great game, really scratches that factory building itch in a lot of ways, and the tag system makes it a lot of fun to hunt down some more esoteric items or try to farm some of the more common tags so that you can expand your operations even further.

The keyword system is a great way of shaking up the typical Stardew/crafting game. I have small technical and balance quibbles but as a whole there is a lot of game to dig into. Especially at the humble asking price, it's a steal if it clicks with you at all.

I love cozy crafting games and lifesims so when I saw this I had to get it. At first I was worried the gameplay would be simplistic because the graphics looked a bit bland after playing Fields of Mistria so I was really caught off guard by how unique and FUN this game is. The crafting is so much more flexible and satisfying since you use object attributes to craft instead of being locked into specific ingredients/recipes. I really appreciate that we have 1 upgradable laser we use to harvest that we can augement to improve our fishing/mining/farming skills. The minigames are actually fun and have a gameboy era aesthetic I'm obsessed with and the ruins portion where we can send a cute robot lad to get materials for us via a satisfying card-based dungeon crawler. The social aspects are a bit bare bones right now; dialogue repeats pretty often and there's no marriage. The creator says they'll add marriage later and I hope they do. But even without those, the gameplay loop is addicting and I love that there is an (spoiler for first few days ingame) [spoiler] actual comic book villain style antagonist in the story who wants to blow up the town lol [/spoiler], it's a nice change of pace ^_^ 8/10, highly recommend if you liked Harvest moon or Stardew Valley. Having a blast just wish there was a bit more social writing and cute aesthetic customization

In this game you can make a table out of fish. ... Not sold yet? Alright. This game takes clear inspiration from Stardew in its format, but puts in some incredibly cool twists that make it wholly its own. [*] The crafting system alone - items have category tags that let them be substituted as materials, so a fish with the Wood tag can indeed make a table - could serve its own game, but oh, it also has a unique and fun fishing mechanic, and Slay the Spire-esque combat, and there are ways around things if you don't enjoy engaging in something specific. [*] The writing is funny and doesn't overstay its welcome; there's no romance (yet...I have hope for a future update!), but the character quests, while short, do a lot to make the town feel like an actual community, and I love the way changes you make in the quests have an actual impact - one character asked for a stroller so she could take her infant sibling on a walk, and the day after I gave it to her I saw her using it on her afternoon walk! [*] I have the Summer theme stuck in my head still, and the sound design is really satisfying, especially the harvesting. [*] Speaking of harvesting, the omnitool is a really cool mechanic and I love it. I thought it'd be clumsy to use on the Steamdeck, but the touchpad actually makes it super smooth. [*] In general, aside from a few menu/UI issues (needing to manually trigger the keyboard, swapping between some menus, etc), the Steamdeck experience has been great. Protip: don't set the UI to 2x. 1.5 was the sweet spot for me in terms of readability/usability. [*] If you're an automation sicko like me, holy crap can you automate things in this game. You don't necessarily need to, it's balanced in a way that you can definitely just do things manually if you want, but I take a lot of satisfaction in breaking a game's economy over my knee and there's plenty of room for that here. [*] The dev is super responsive in Discord, which is always a plus for me. If you're looking for something fresh in the Stardewlike genre, look no further.

An excellent concept for a game, with a solid core game loop already in and an extremely active and responsive developer. The core gameplay mechanic is simple: every item in the game, be it a harvested raw material, an animal product, or goods from the general store, has a bunch of associated tags with point values. Crafting, item processing, and quest turn-ins don't usually call for a specific item, but for an item tag or a group of tags. For example, making a battery requires some amount of items with [metal] tags, so you can use your hard-earned processed iron or copper bars no problem, as you normally would in any other game. But that empty beer can you fished up earlier could work just as well, meaning something that would normally be considered junk (it even has the [trash] tag) is actually fairly useful! This leaves you constantly asking yourself "What's the easiest way to get this tag?" and "which tags on this item are the most useful?" That [fish] you just caught could always be roasted up into a quick meal, but since it's a [blue] fish it might be more valuable as a dye in making a blue piece of furniture a quest asks for later. If you liked stockpiling every item in stardew/minecraft/etc "just in case I need it later" you'll find yourself frequently rewarded for your efforts in this game. And since most of the uses for an item are in its tags, you can also make a good educated guess when you [i]don't[/i] need to save something and can safely use it now. "I already have a large pile of [yellow] squash, I can safely cook my yellowfin snapper for energy." As for the active developer, within twenty minutes of me joining the developer's discord I saw him successfully discover a bug with another player and asked him to put an achievement in the game for doing something silly. At the same time, we were discussing how to prevent infinite item crafting loops and getting feedback on adding plot foreshadowing in the first week. No, the game isn't finished yet, but after about ~10 hours I can tell there's already at least another 15-20 hours in here and I'll be sad when I run out. The game is already easily worth the current price though and will only improve with time.

A comfy crafting game, with a lot of depth. Researching things is very satisfying. Also nice to see a lot of little details like the cute animals and vegetation swaying in the breeze. I have not finished it but I am enjoying it so far. There's so much that you can do each day.