Xoo: Xeno Xafari

Quirky and relaxing game based on exploration and collecting. You try to spot Xenos, the flora and fauna of the Bermuda Triangle (where you are vacationing) and also collect eggs, videogame cartridges, nuts, collectibles (lol) and precious stones. Then you sell the eggs to get funds to buy gadgets that allow you to find even more xenos. The nuts add energy to the amount of stamina you'll have the next day to keep exploring (your energy is actually measured in steps, a new day starts every time you deplete the amount of daily steps). The graphics are a mix between NES and Gameboy Color and very charming. My only pet peeve is that the music is too frantic and clashes with the relaxing atmosphere of the game (so, i play with sound but without music). The best part of the game is the lore of the xenos and the collectibles, full of absurdist humor that made me laugh out loud several times. Very recomendable.

Xoo: Xeno Xafari is somewhere between a walking simulator and a low-stakes RPG where you spend your Summer Vacation on a strange island full of alien Xenos. And it captures the feeling of summer camp and summer vacation - some days, you spot something cool. You'll peek your head into a cave and find a Xeno made out of shimmering glass. Most days, however, you're going to wander around looking for something new and come up short before going home. You'll run into robotic characters day after day who have a few things to say about the Xenos of the island, or maybe they really want to get you into Scouts with merit badges, or video games. As you spend more time, you'll stay in contact with your best friend, and a ghost that really has too much time on their hands. As far as the Xeno designs go, they run the range of okay to goofy looking in all the best ways. The game's limited graphical style also limits these creatures to a two-frame stationary animation, so be prepared to see lots of weird wiggling monsters. Mechanically, the game is a dice roller, and your chances are aided by one of four skills. Xenos have a chance of either showing up, or not. When you want to explore a spot or try to access a difficult area, you roll the dice. If you succeed, you enter an area, or get a collectible item. To keep you exploring, and to not take the same routes every day, the game scatters around nuts and eggs that you eat and sell to boost the number of Xenos you can find, or explore further out on the island on any given day. Along with finding Xenos, you can find fossils, gems, toys, and even a journal as you wander the island. The RPG elements, along with the eggs and the nuts, are there to give you a few extra character choices to help you find all the content in the game. However, I will admit that these mechanics feel frustrating because gaining skills is also random, so there aren't many "effective" choices you can make to build your character up. But let's be honest, many of us wasted our summer vacations and if we learned something, it was mainly by accident. Thematically, I think the game mechanics tie in well with the story it's trying to sell you, however, I think the experience might be dry for many. While the island's five (as of this review) areas have some sick tunes that don't wear thin, there is a level of frustration that sets in once you've managed to afford all of the xeno hunting gear, and begin to wander into one area, pop your head in to see if there's a new critter to scope out, and then go to bed. It's frankly a little disappointing given that a lot of the descriptions written are fun and playful. My playthrough of Xoo took about 7.5 hours. I honestly believe it could be cut down to a more manageable time if you make a different choice making your character: choose foraging, then hunting, then exploring, then collecting as you level up. This will help you buy all of the gear you need, and will keep you seeing new Xenos at a healthy clip. I understand that if that sounds like a stay away factor, however, I think at it's core this game is wonderful, and I enjoyed the vast majority of my time with it. This is a game worth picking up. It's a few bucks, you can download it, putter around for maybe an hour or so and if you want to keep seeing wiggling monsters, then you'll keep at it. Otherwise, you might bounce off but will probably have smiled or snickered at some of the writing you did experience. If you want a shorter, but more serious experience, try out Void Pyramid. If you want a good puzzle/rpg experience, check out Ramble Planet. This is more for the dev but - The early to mid-game is great, however, it's when you're at the point of constantly starting a new day at specific campsites that I feel like the experience falls apart. I spent a good amount of time also refreshing to get collectibles. Perhaps cutting down on some of the less interesting Xenos and items might alleviate that (I frankly found the reskins of certain Xeno's to be charming, but I wasn't charmed enough since I was having the ending gated from me). The solution you tried to implement - just tossing out lures, doesn't feel great. Happy vibing y'all.

A chill, relaxing little buffet of the developer's characteristic weirdness. No time pressure, no goals, minimal progression. Just you wandering around happening upon strange little sprites with even stranger descriptions.

Good collect-athon style game. Very relaxing and satisfying. The only things missing are achievements. (Would fit perfectly with the collection markers and wide variety of collections.)

Summary: With adorable visuals and incredibly hilarious writing, Xoo’s opening hours are a treat, but the game is really weighed down by extremely repetitive gameplay and chance mechanics that turn it from fun to tedious by the end. 6.5/10 Video Version of this review: https://youtu.be/Zig0wwiUgsI Full review: Xoo: Xeno Xafari is a fast-paced collect-a-thon set on a deserted island full of alien life with a gameplay loop and art style that harken back to the 16-bit era of gaming, and immediately when I loaded into the game I knew I was in for something special. When I got my review copy of the game, I had almost no idea what to expect, all I’d known was the game’s extremely basic premise from the store page, quote: “It's your summer vacation on Xoo Island! This beautiful, deserted island is populated by a surreal menagerie of alien creatures. Can you find them all? While you're at it, you might as well collect a bunch of fossils, gems, eggs, merit badges, video games, and anything else that isn't nailed down. Xoo: Xeno Xafari is a new style of collecting RPG.” I was immediately on the hook, a game where I could just kick back and relax while exploring a massive island sounded like exactly what I needed, and plus it promised a chance to find a ton of collectibles! Yeah, they uh definitely weren’t lying! Everything you could imagine finding on an island populated with hundreds of Aliens and a few robots is… here, but with over 500 things to find, it was hard for me to convince myself it was worth going out of my way to collect them all. Some locations and collectibles are blocked off by a chance mechanic that only gets slightly less frustrating over time. Of the 275 collectible items in the game, 150 require you to travel well out of your way to even have a shot at getting them. Eventually, you’re able to increase your odds of collecting them, but only slightly. It’s incredibly unsatisfying. Xoo’s core gameplay loop suffers from a different yet equally frustrating issue: pacing. It’s seriously front-loaded which, yes, for the first few hours is great but about halfway through there were nearly no new mechanics to keep the game interesting. I spent the last 4 hours of my time with Xoo going from point A to point B then starting the next day to do it all over again in the hopes of finding a new Xeno that could give me that hit of pure joy I had in the first few hours. The art style in this game is just wonderful, its super easy on the eyes while not looking so basic that it feels samey. Every area is unique and interesting, ranging from sandy beaches to billowing swamps. I appreciate the amount of work that went into the Xeno designs, every single one is easy to distinguish, and so memorable that I’m sure I’ll be seeing them when I sleep. The creators really cared about making something special, and it shows. And on top of ALL of that, the music in this game is great, but admittedly towards the finish, it had gotten so repetitive that I had to mute it and play my own music instead. I couldn’t tell you exactly why, but the writing in this game struck a chord with me. Everything from the Xeno descriptions to the emails I got consistently made me laugh out loud, which often isn’t the case with video games. From what I understand the characters you talk to completely change depending on which character you play, I only had the time to beat the game with one but if the side stories are as lovable and interesting with the other characters as they were with mine, I’d feel comfortable saying Xoo is the most charming game I’ve ever played. Thanks to the email system, I got to hear from people back at home, the ones that talked to me had fascinating story beats that I thought were going to be literal game-changers but ended up not going anywhere or resolving in any satisfying way. Well before the end of the game’s 10-hour runtime all of the emails stopped, and with it, the story. From that point forward everything felt shallow, there were no more emails to look forward to and the game didn’t try to balance it out with new mechanics to keep it interesting. Having a story with the NPCs could’ve been a great way to make the player character anything more than the body that takes you from place to place, and if it were fleshed out it could’ve made those hollow moments in the second half of the game much less of an issue. Overall, I enjoyed most of my time with Xoo, but between the pacing issues and a lack of story structure, I can’t see myself returning to the island anytime soon.

I'm not good at reviews, but I really enjoyed this game! The dialogue for the characters is nice, the music is cool, the descriptions for the collectibles and the xenos are nicely written and many are funny, and the xeno designs are REALLY cool. Had many moments where I'd spot a new one and go "OH! What is THAT?" and was not disappointed. Overall a great game to play when you want to unwind and just have a good time.

Fun collectathon game with entertaining descriptions.

[h1] Cute little collect em all [/h1] Xoo: Xeno Xafari is a game all about spotting and jotting down wacky and out of this world creatures. I recommend this game to anyone who loves to fully collect and complete everything from a game. A few cons would have to be the grind-like gameplay to find all the critters and collectables. It gets tedious towards the end of the game when you're trying to find the last few Xenos so do look out for that. I enjoyed the emails you receive while staying on the island, its pretty neat to know someone cares about me while I'm embarked on a journey. 8.5/10