Wildmender

Wildmender is a lovely game. Truly. You can see how much care went into the visual details of this game. The changes to your surroundings as the day moves to night and back to day again. The details of all the plants, the critters, even the enemies that you have to defeat. There are some really big ups and downs for this game, but the ups do (barely) outweigh the downs. Ups/Positives: The game is really lovely. The game is not specifically timed, so you don't have to stress about doing tasks before a timer goes off. (I do say it's not "specifically" timed because you do have your own personal timer type of thing where if you don't drink enough water in the sun, you will not be able to complete a task. But you don't have an external time limit for most things.) Building your home oasis is interesting as you learn more about the plants of the world. You don't need to take tons of notes to follow the storyline. Your tasks are accessible within the game and most of them are relatively self-explanatory. Downs/Negatives Some of the instructions aren't just vague, they are completely lacking. You have no way to ask for more help or clarification within the game. You just have to muddle through or go into the game discussion groups. The can cause the game to get incredibly frustrating. Some of the tasks require a specific type of plant and there is only ONE of that type of plant anywhere in the world, good luck finding it! And hopefully you didn't destroy it before you needed it. There are bugs, and a fairly large number of them. The devs know about a lot of them, as shown in the discussion groups. However, even a year or two later, those bugs are still not fixed. Companion to that, the developers barely respond to anyone in the discussion groups. I don't think I saw anything more recent than early 2026. No bugs are being fixed and the last thing they said was basically "We're all done! Bye!" (This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is still frustrating for many players. Old and new players would like to have the bugs resolved and maybe even additional content created. Because of the bugs, some of the achievements are almost impossible to get. This one is a much milder negative, but it is frustrating. Overall, I do like the game. I don't know that it will be replayable often, maybe once or twice after beating it the first time. Lack of replayability is a problem for me, but it's a personal issue. Someone else may not have the same issue. I like the relaxed nature of the game. I like healing the springs and growing new plants around them. I would be ecstatic if the developers came back to this game and expanded on it, or created a sequel. There are so many options that they could make use of for either expansions or a new game. I don't expect developers to support a game indefinitely. However, this game is not very old and is still being promoted by the creators, so it feels a bit like a kick in the teeth for them to want to continue to make money off the game, but not put any effort into maintaining a connection with the players even by just fixing the bugs that they know about. Do I recommend this game? Yes, with the caveat that you should buy it on sale and don't expect much from the creators. But I know that I'll have some hesitation before buying anything else that the creators promote or create just based on my experience with this.

В роли последнего человека нам предстоит навести порядок в засушливом аду. Минимальная цель – выжить, промежуточная – наладить контакт с божествами, максимальная – возродить природу во всём её великолепии. Посетить предстоит четыре региона – пустынные дюны, безжизненные солончаки, отравленные каньоны и морозные горы. Почти вся природа погибла, оставив после себя тоскливые пейзажи и мёртвую растительность под лучами безжалосного солнца. Выжить удалось лишь немногим видам, кои мы будем высаживать вокруг возрождаемых родников. Потребности у растений различаются, плюс они заметно влияют на окружение, а ещё доступно выведение гибридных сортов. Прокопка каналов, строительство изгородей и защитных алтарей – тоже на наших плечах. Помощников немного – три жабы, броненосец, несколько светящихся зверьков и призраки, которые будут делиться знаниями (прокачкой). Для быстрого перемещения по пустошам придётся разблокировать многочисленные порталы, также помогут вещи вроде грибного зонтика и воздушного плаща, но истоптать всё равно предстоит ни одну пару башмаков. Врагами выступят злобные фантомы, их придётся изгонять зеркальцем, огненным амулетом и ещё парочкой артефактов с разными принципами действия. Резюме: добротный садоводческий симулятор выживания.

I found the combat in the game incredibly annoying and wondered if it was something that was added on because someone thought the crafting and survival part of the game wasn't exciting enough. This is unfortunate, because I genuinely liked the crafting and survival part. But I ended up getting soft-locked in combat during a questline and had to walk away from the game for awhile. When I came back, I ended up walking away after a particularly annoying combat section, so that was two play sessions in a row I walked away from frustrated and annoyed. I came back today to change the settings to something that I could maybe enjoy despite the combat required to progress the story. I found instead that my save file was corrupted and was given instructions to visit the game's website and faq to fix it. No. No, I will not close the game to go to your website to fix your broken game for you. I'm insulted that you would suggest it. If there's something I need to do to, again, fix your game for you, those instructions need to be far more accessible than that. Three attempts to play this game and all three attempts left me frustrated and infuriated either with the gameplay itself or the game as a product. I really wanted to like this game, but the awkward combat that cannot be avoided and the jankiness of the design left me feeling like I wasted both my time and money. Cannot recommend.

The game's concept itself is really cool, the plants and especially the water mechanics are implemented very cool. But the game still has so many issues including bugs, performance problems, and map design flaws so that the longer I played it, the less fun it felt, to the point where I didn't want to finish the main story. The biggest problem with the game, though, is that none of these issues are being fixed because the developers. It's like they seem to have abandoned it. By that I mean that the last update was over two years ago, and it didn’t even come close to addressing all the problems the game had at that time. My conclusion is that the game can be a lot of fun at first, but the longer you play it, the more you realize that it was released prematurely and unfinished, so I can’t really recommend it.

Oyun biraz vasat, temada daha iyi işlenebilirmiş gibi geldi. Çölde olmanın o zorluğunu yaşarım diye düşünüyorum ama çok da bir ekstrasını hissedemedim. Genel döngü biraz çiğ geldi.

It's a great game and you can tell how much love they put into it, but it feels like they ran out of budget mid development and did what they could with what they had. The gameplay loop is essentially digging out trenches to move water around and make an oasis. You plant stuff near water so it can grow, and things grow you can expand further out. There's a lot of upgrades to have more water, different kinds of plants, biomes, defenses, etc. It's got a basic crafting and survival loop; you have to manage hunger and thirst, as well as some status effects later on in the game. I loved all the different plants and the variants you can find and grow. You can do a lot of beautiful gardening. There are some building elements, but it's mostly limited to walls and some decorations. It's disappointing that you can't actually make buildings or at least restore the existing ones in the world. The entire time your "house" is a tent and you don't really get anything else. The optimization is really lacking for mid to late game, especially in multiplayer. If you have multiple players in different areas and build a lot, the game starts dropping frames really badly and it does not get any better the further in you get. The game has story "cutscenes" that are nothing but a black screen. Even very important storyline elements are nothing but a black screen with subtitles. There's no voice acting, no visuals using any of the game's assets, just... a black screen and text. It honestly felt really cheap that a fully released game still has something like that, which I wouldn't expect past the early stages of early access. Ultimately I do recommend it, but it feels lacking in polish despite the obvious love that was put into it. I still really enjoyed my experience, and I think that's why I'm critical of it; I think it deserved more polish than it was given and I wish it fully lived up to its potential. Definitely worth picking up, especially on a sale, but there will be some jank and weird bits as I've described above.

Beautiful concept. So rare is a game with such a focus on growth and restoration rather than death and destruction that also pulls it off with satisfying gameplay and a unique vibe to boot. For the players who would rather not just kill things until the land magically restores itself but instead have the active hand in its healing be central to gameplay, this is definitely worth checking out. ONE FOR MY DRUIDS. The world needs more of this.

Extremely annoying. I had my eye on this for a while, thought it would be fun, and it's basically a "run around and water your plants" simulator, except you don't have enough water, the game gates the water flow behind a bunch of quests and isn't clear on how you get to that point, the tooltips can be annoying inaccurate, the game gives you a tiny inventory, and you can weave baskets to store your stuff in, but they deteriorate along with everything else. I've spent most of my time trying to keep plants alive and trying to coax my pathetic stream into some semblance of an irrigated channel with digging/fill tools that are abysmal. Huge quality of life issues exist in this game. It could be good, but it feels like a massive chore.