Recent reviews by Limesy

I'm honestly finding this game hard to digest which is a shame because I really want to love it. It's such a gorgeously crafted world with unfortunately shallow characters and a stressful learning curve.
The dialogue is quirky but everyone seems to have similar dialogue besides their introduction and have almost nothing memorable about them. So much so that I couldn't tell many people apart besides my family members, the fishing trainer and the shopkeepers.
It has this awkward loop of constantly feeling rushed while having the game telling you to take it slow. Days end so quickly with the only way to track time early on being a confusing dandelion "timer". I'm assuming this is because of the generational mechanic but I'd much prefer feeling like I've achieved something meaningful each day. The majority of that time felt like it was spent running from task to task. Huge, looping map layouts that are confusing to learn and navigate.

I don't think I'll touch this again without some changes to day length (maybe a slider to day length in the options), base movement speed and a more intuitive world map.

Incredibly over-hyped. It's fun at times and I definitely see the appeal but it's missing incredibly basic functionality features and has huge path-finding issues.

You see those beautifully straight lines of Pals carrying things in the trailer? lol. The Pals get stuck on just about everything when doing tasks in your base. They get confused deciding on tasks to do at times. They will occasionally unlock themselves from the task you set them to.

Structures have really awful placement clipping so building on anything other than perfectly flat land is pointless. Some structures slightly float no matter how you place it. Placing the "home" for your base doesn't show you a preview of the area limit until after building it. There's some cute decorations but houses become very box-like because of the limited pieces available.

Enormous (and I mean, ENORMOUS) map with very little actually on it. The "Forest" area could easily be half the size.

Huge multiplayer issues and really basic functionality missing. If you want to see players on the map, you have to be in their guild and each guild can only have a limited amount of bases (one, to begin with). Crafting/building uses from ALL chests in the base area, even chests that are privated/pin coded. Just collected 100 wood and saving it for later? Yeah, sorry, your friend just built their house out of it.
Issues with losing player data and getting stuck connecting to servers. Very basic admin tools currently.

Edited on the 4.0 patch (still not full release).

Sandrock feels like it's taken two steps forward and one step back compared to Portia.

It's not to say that I hate the game, I've definitely been having fun. It's just not what I was expecting. Some of the mechanics are similar, some have been improved but there's also random filler put into parts of the game that is just annoying or strange.

The combat feels just as clunky as Portia. There is different attack combos on different weapon types that feel stiff and forced. Monsters now also have barriers that you can break to get some extra damage and daze them. It's just so awkward that combat quickly became incredibly monotonous. Oh and you can shoot guns now.

The early game is fetching piles of scrap that give you everything you need and more for most jobs and commissions. It drains your stamina incredibly quickly so that you have to order ridiculous amounts of food at the Inn or sit on a bench for a measly amount of stamina regeneration. The game even prompts you in the loading screen to order huge amounts of food. The only thing that really speeds things up is tool upgrades that unlock based on story progress. In Portia you could raise your attack stat to break things quicker but in Sandrock most gathering is locked behind "tool strength" with few ways to increase it, which I thought was a missed opportunity for gear and accessories.

Some of the townsfolk are frustrating. I'm sorry but I rolled my eyes at the stereotypes and unoriginal characters. You remember that overly camp secretary from Portia called Antione? Yep. There's someone called Pablo who looks incredibly similar, is very camp and this time LOVES FASHION AND GOSSIP. There's also the typical old lady tailor and a character that is basically Annie from League of Legends (bear and all) to name some others.
The social grind is now actually manageable. The story and game length are long enough that you will most likely befriend at least a few people before "finishing" the game.
Each of them give a bonus at different stages in the friendship like they did in Portia. However, when you get around to earning those perks, you probably won't need them because you are so far into the game already. It was the same issue in Portia. I'm half a year into the game and just unlocked a +100 hp bonus when I already have about 4.5k.

There's now a quality system with crafting that adds some depth to the workshop side of the game but it didn't actually feel relevant for most of the game, outside of wanting the most from your equipment or the occasional high quality commission. Tools, weapons, gear accessories all have randomised stats on it so you'd better pray for a good roll if you're hunting for some good items early on, or enjoy re-rolling them over and over until you get the one you want.
P.S The game doesn't tell you what random affixes/stats are even available on each item so you'll have to work it out yourself, enjoy re-rolling!

Tooltips are misleading, some completely wrong and a lot still have poor English. There's a luck stat. What does it do? Who knows because the game doesn't tell you.

There's trash everywhere in town. I cleaned up everything I saw and 2 days later it was worse than before. Let me build some darn bins so I can teach these townsfolk how to put their rubbish in it.

The environment is cool, albeit a little monotonous at times. There are also parts of the map that are just completely ugly. The desert has rocks that look okay from a distance but when you are next to them, they are a completely different style to the rest of the game. They literally look like big blobs of cheese.
The map is enormous for no apparent reason and not in a good way. There's so much nothingness in some areas. I had to set my time scale all the way down because traversing the desert to explore it took an entire day.
There's weird invisible barriers where it looks like there shouldn't be. The map doesn't match up with the world in some areas. There's gaps, seams and holes in some areas of the map.

The research in this game can still be frustrating. I'd been churning out research for new machines every day but because you can only research one thing at a time and it takes days to complete I got locked for a week in game on story content because I wanted to research the cooking stations. You can't queue research either, so you have to run over to the building every time you want to start a new research.

House decorating is an absolute shemozzle. You have very limited decoration options, most things don't match, adding multiple stories means multiple staircases which by default seem to take up 1/4 of a room. Moving buildings can send huge amounts of items from your machines/chests/house to your mailbox. Picking machines or chests up is incredibly annoying. Your cursor will auto default to the middle option most times which is "retrieve". Guess what happens if you accidentally click it? More items to your mailbox.
There's no pathing options.

Storage and inventory management is a mess. I wish luck to anyone who isn't a compulsive sorter by nature. You can quick dump items but guess what happens if you use up all of that item? You gotta find the box it goes in when you get another. There are HUNDREDS of items.
What's worse is that the bigger chests have pages, so opening a chest means you have to flick through different pages sometimes.
It seems like they didn't realise quite how big the game was going to get and just slapped on extra pages to your inventory and chests to compensate.

The museum is incredibly dull in this game. They should have literally kept it the same as Portia but open straight off the bat like it is in Sandrock. Apart from a luck necklace reward (which again, is not explained what it actually does) and a few social points with one person, I saw no point to donating things. I barely saw anyone in it and the only time I'd actually get social points from them admiring items, they were relics that I'd put on my house or in my workshop, not actually in the museum.

Load times can still be long at times and you'll have to enter a lot of houses and buildings because there are so many things indoors (restaurant/commission board/research/people/shops, etc). I can see this still being an issue for people with lower-middle range computers.

Despite all of this, Sandrock just has that juicy gameloop which they have really nailed. It feels rewarding to play and you always have something to do or work towards. You are constantly fixing or upgrading things around town. You are always earning Gols or earning hearts with the townsfolk. It's just solid.

There's also a story that is a little bit more cohesive than Portia. It's still got it's clunky moments but it tells it through cut scenes and is sprinkled in better portions. I will say that most smaller side quests weren't voiced, which is fine... but reading the dialogue with just the background music is deafeningly quiet compared to the main story quests. Please add some "hmm/ahh/okay" or at least the text noises that the rest of the game's dialogue has.

The UI is pleasant and readable most of the time. The talent/knowledge page has an awful description layout but it seemed fine other than that.

The ruin diving was a huge improvement. The dungeons are more visually interesting. Good enemy variety.

Farming is cool. Sand fishing is cool. I like both of them being styled a bit different to most farming sims.

If you are happy to wait I would recommend letting the game get a few rounds of polish but if you buy it now I'm sure you will still enjoy it. There's A LOT of game and you will absolutely get bang for your buck.

Probe is not the kind of game that I usually play, but I was pleasantly surprised after being told about it by a friend. It's got an interesting mechanic which makes you juggle a ball while playing a classic block breaker game. It's fun and challenging and only a few dollars. Keep up the great work. :)

I'm so torn between a Yes and No. I guess Yes if it's on sale for at least half price. No otherwise.

This game feels like it's missing so much. After finishing my first (and probably only) play-through, I was left feeling really underwhelmed and with an itch that felt like it was being poked instead of scratched. On the surface, the game seems to have all of the things that I was looking for but a few hours in I was already starting to see that some of those areas were incredibly bare bones.

Let me start off with character customisation... I created a character, put points into my skills and stats. Awesome. Felt unique, felt fresh, ready to take on Halcyon. Leveled up, got 10 points to put in skills. Cool. Leveled up, 10 points, another 10, another 10. This is where it lost me. I finished the game on level 30, that's about 300 points. I spent half the game with so many extra points, or often just putting them into skills I didn't care much for simply because they were there. I didn't feel at any point through the game that I really wanted to have a certain skill, apart from not being able to go through some locked doors occasionally.
Perks, more "meaningful" (and I use this term very loosely) choices that you get every 2 levels felt very unrewarding and mediocre at best. Non-interesting things such as flat damage increases, flat stat increases, slightly more slow-time. Didn't really notice any of them except for the carry weight increases. Boring, again finished the game with about 7 unused.
Flaws... a system where you accept a negative affect for a Perk Point. Accepted one, realised I didn't need the perk point, never touched them again. An entire system just wasted. To make it worse, the negative affects are also incredibly uninteresting. Most were just a flat increase to damage taken or -1, -2, -3, etc in a stat.

All of this was shocking to me. Playing on the hardest difficulty I literally never felt like there was a challenge or needed any of these boosts to finish the game especially since I'm not great at shooter games.

This brings me onto the next part, the Combat Gameplay... it's okay. That's it. It's got a slow time mechanic which is fun for a few battles and then I quickly realised that you don't generally need it. Enemies either fall over so quick or die to poor AI that I stopped using it half way through my play-through. Enemies are predictable once you learn their names (for example, a "Goon" has a melee weapon). The weapon selection is incredibly limited, but most do feel nice to use. You can mod them which doesn't really change anything up a whole lot since they are mostly just +% crit chance, etc. I honestly don't remember a single fight that was really that challenging or memorable. Even the last fight was so easy that I didn't even realise it was supposed to be a "boss" of sorts.

The gameplay outside of combat was mostly lackluster too. Dialogue does have some interesting moments but they are so few and far between. It felt like I was re-meeting characters from the Fallout series half the time. Companions? Bland. Didn't care for any besides the janitor robot... and it's a bleeping robot. Everything felt like it had no impact besides the end-screen cinematic, which again was predictable. Literally the only person I remember is this guy locked in a toilet that's covered in poop.
Most of the story lines felt rushed and there wasn't a single one that I hadn't half guessed what would happen or had me thinking that whoever I was looking for wasn't dead or dying. Side quests are mostly fetch quests. Main quest is short.
Had a moral dilemma on the first quest, felt like I was replaying that same moral choice for every other quest.

The difficulty of the game was just no where. The hardest, Supernova, apart from the beginning hour or two had no real challenge. Supplies are literally everywhere and money was a non-issue. It honestly just felt annoying to play. Companions permanently dying? What? Why can I not fast travel? I spent so much time just running between spots. It's like they've thought of all the things that are annoying and just slapped that on to try and make it harder.

Now, you might be thinking that I've only written negatives so far... but the game does have some good things too. 30 hours of play time and I haven't experienced a single bug. The game seems to be optimised decently enough. The landscapes (albeit being a little hollow) look nice and it's honestly a great atmosphere most of the time. There's just not enough to see.

The corporations and consumerism were fun, but there's just simply not enough there. It really would have been so much more interesting with more depth here, because it's one of the stronger parts of the game. A song or two for each and you'd have enough to spin a radio channel in the game to listen to. More jingles to listen to. More in your face advertisement. They all end up being thrown in the "evil" bin which spoiled the entire thing for me.

The hidden moments are great. Jumping up into little areas and crouching to find loot felt great.

There's quite a few dialogue options and ways of responding to situations which is nice.

Overall, I really wanted to like it but it's just so Meh. I rushed through the last section because I just wanted to move on to something else. Buy it or don't, you aren't missing anything.

Okay, also I forgot to mention but there's this weird collection mechanic that the game literally just DOESN'T TELL YOU ABOUT. You can find items which get placed into your companions rooms which are supposed to give some kind of hints at their personalities, I guess? BUT LIKE WHY DID I ONLY FOUND THIS OUT UNTIL HALF WAY THROUGH THE GAME? As a collector I was SO. TRIGGERED.

It is honestly so rare to find a game that ticks all the boxes and I'm stuck playing for hours and hours and still wanting to play more.
This game is absolutely gorgeous and the attention to detail in every single moment is obvious. The music is brilliant. The characters are charming. The gameplay is crisp. It's heartfelt.

I played for 6 hours straight and my only gripes were that:
- Everything seems to have some sort of flashy animation, in particular there are parts where the screen flashes white, and it's very intense to the point I had to look away.
- Animations for certain things like watering crops and catching a fish could be a little quicker.

Overall, I'm so stoked I purchased this game and I'm very excited to finish playing through it.

Littlewood is a charming and warm RPG where the player takes the role of "The Hero of Solemn" and is tasked with rebuilding a town within the realm. It is easy to pick up and is very addictive, I've spent hours on it already and didn't realise. It has emphasis on the player being creative and building the town themselves while working alongside some simple puzzle mechanics (residents asking for items, to be close/far from certain things, etc).

This game is something entirely different from most of the RPG farming games out there and although it draws inspiration and similarities from them, the mechanics of Littlewood are a lot more light when compared. Skills, known as "Hobbies" in Littlewood, mostly involve interacting with the various trees/rocks/bugs/etc and although they are quite simple, they are satisfying to level up.
There is no rush to fill out days as time is tracked as an energy bar, so the more you use energy the later in the day it becomes. It's relaxing. The art is crisp. It was a joy playing through Early Access and it's a joy to play now that it's fully released.

What this game does well:
+ Keeps things simple but interesting
+ Graphics are cute
+ Focus on small tasks at a time rather than huge chunks of progress
+ Good variety of interior decorations
+ LOTS of player freedom with town planning and decorating
+ Progression is rewarded
+ Interesting lore and places to explore
+ Satisfying to slowly fill out and polish your town

One of the best games I've played.