WREN

Very very simple. Has a wonderful artstyle and a cute, innocent sort of attitude like a gameboy RPG. I do find myself wishing it was a little more in-depth, and that there was more you could do with *your* character in specific besides just adding him to the small population of meandering townsfolk. Ultimately, the NPCs come across as little more than set pieces with a few lines, and the game itself feels more like a browser idler game than the cardio-fueled Stardew Valley I was (admittedly unrealistically) kinda' hoping for. Still adds a fun component to my daily runs, it synced quickly and nicely to the free Strava phone app, and it has a solid sense of progression that promises I'll have to do a *lot* of exercising before I can consider myself having 'beat' it. I really do appreciate it.

I really want to like this because the idea is good, but there's about a tenth of an actual game here. The art style is a schizophrenic mix of vintage clip art and generic pixel art. The gameplay is... Well, you get to watch things happen, I guess? And it takes dozens of attempts to finish a mission/quest thing? The pacing is absurdly slow-- everything requires vast quantities of mana and you burn mana just to go do attacks. I really wanted this to be better but wow. I am surprised to see it's not in early access any more, even though it still feels like something somebody threw together in an afternoon from whatever assets they had kicking around. There's a place for a cool game tied into Strava activities, but sadly this is not that game. EDIT: It takes so long to figure out there's no game here that it will get you past the refund period. Don't do it. Don't even think "no, this couldn't be that bad." It's that bad.