[b]the unintended consequences of curiosity[/b] looks like a cute little puzzle/adventure that works both as a single player experience and co-op for up to 4 players. the problem is, it's so buggy it barely works as anything.
the game starts in a village where you live with your parents and apparently participate in unpaid child labor. you even have to make your own pickaxe, unheard of! at least some rocks drop gold and such, probably to be used later on something, but I didn't get that far. while hacking away at stones, you find a cave and accidentally freeze the entire population by breaking the snow globe inside, which in turn becomes a ranged weapon somehow. so you gotta travel south and fetch the eternal torch from a magma- and monster-filled cave and set things right. [b]it's a linear game but still somewhat open[/b], with the possibility to explore multiple regions in any order to gather stuff needed to progress into closed off areas.
despite appearances, [b]nothing on the way will be friendly[/b]. even fluffy bunnies are from monty python and they kill you if you touch them. they can be frozen for a few seconds and killed with the pickaxe and might even drop some meat, but also respawn relatively fast from their burrows, just like in real life. there are also mud monsters that take 3 freeze-pick attacks to deal with, and urinal-looking statues shooting mud (yeah, right). your own [b]death means respawning at the entrance of the current area with a few seconds of invincibility[/b], no other consequence from what I could tell, so it's just a minor annoyance.
[b]controls aren't rebindable and there's no mouse support.[/b] if you're not using a controller (I wasn't), it's arrows to move around, space to pick up items and talk to people, q/w/e to use items in 3 different slots. sprinting would've been nice to save some time, but even though there are technically only 3 slots and only money stacks (and is stored separately), you can pick up a total of 8 items, then press tab and assign the hotkeys to something else, or press 'r' to drop them (unless it bugs out and breaks the game, as it did for me).
my biggest concern about the game was the [b]boss fights[/b] mentioned on the store page. the first one wasn't too bad, the second more annoying until I figured out how it works, but [b]the game broke and froze right after the fight when I wanted to drop something to pick up the quest item[/b]. after restarting the game, I was back right before the fight despite winning it already. did it again, tried to drop something, only to run into the same issue, so [b]I stopped trying and uninstalled[/b].
nice graphics, music on the repetitively side, but [b]separate volume settings are useless because audio levels are all over the place[/b]. I set sfx level based on the clicking sound in the menu, only to be greeted with incredibly loud snoring as soon as the game started. lowered it and luckily I could barely hear the [b]annoying gibberish during dialog[/b] (or pretty much anything else), but when I opened a chest or started breaking rocks, it was really loud still. also, no voiceovers, so [b]the store page is lying about having full audio in 5 languages[/b].
windowed mode, resolutions and languages are available, but there are typos and an ugly font for speech, and [b]after re-entering an area, examined items and people reset as if they're yet to be interacted with[/b]. really annoying, hard to keep track and find out if they have anything new to say, though as far as I know they never do. enemies also tend to respawn, sometimes even rocks, but combat is mostly a non-issue.
there's [b]no manual saving, nor any indication of autosaving, but I think it saves every time you enter a new area[/b]. numerous smaller glitches here and there as well, and the way respawns (don't really) work, [b]you can have more items than you should, filling up your inventory, letting you skip entire areas[/b] because why go there if you already have what you need to progress? and as I found out, it can actually lead to gamebreaking bugs as a bonus.
overall, it's [b]a buggy mess with not many redeeming qualities[/b]. mostly easy, not memorable in any way (except the bugs), probably more enjoyable with others, but that's true for most games, multiplayer or otherwise, and I simply can't recommend it in its current state. it should've been called [b]the unintended but dealbreaking consequences of the lack of proper testing[/b]. stay very far away.
