This review contains spoilers
A cool little experience that nails its vibes and feels wonderfully distinct.
The idea of matching a simple crop harvesting idle game with the explicit framing of an accompanying music album is great. These 2 halves really synergize well with each other.
The only sticking point is that the album tracks are coupled to clicking on waystones. To me, this was easily solved by explicitly waiting for a track to end before advancing. This seems like the intended experience, and watching the gameplay supports this waiting well. It is worth noting that somebody could utterly ruin their experience by rushing waystones and always clicking on them once the path is open, but I think most players will realize that's not how they want to engage with the experience.
[Also the first few waystones are quite well placed to match gameplay pacing with album pacing, this is only an issue that appears after the first zoomed out one]
The track progress visualization is an incredible touch and looks quite cool.
Seeing the field get cleared is pretty satisfying. There's not really any depth to your purchases, but there doesn't need to be for the gameplay to fulfill it's intent here. [Shoutout to the way they replace the verb on "purchase" each time, that's a pretty great gag]
The beacon is a great mechanic, giving the player a sense of agency over how the field gets cleared. Pair that with the murals that get revealed as you clear space, and the player is left with a satisfying and intriguing object to interact with as they listen to the album.
My favorite component is definitely the waystone dialog scenes. I quite like the writing for them and they excelled at leaning into that surreal "music video" style of storytelling. I give the writing a lot of credit for how memorable I found this game.
The idea of matching a simple crop harvesting idle game with the explicit framing of an accompanying music album is great. These 2 halves really synergize well with each other.
The only sticking point is that the album tracks are coupled to clicking on waystones. To me, this was easily solved by explicitly waiting for a track to end before advancing. This seems like the intended experience, and watching the gameplay supports this waiting well. It is worth noting that somebody could utterly ruin their experience by rushing waystones and always clicking on them once the path is open, but I think most players will realize that's not how they want to engage with the experience.
[Also the first few waystones are quite well placed to match gameplay pacing with album pacing, this is only an issue that appears after the first zoomed out one]
The track progress visualization is an incredible touch and looks quite cool.
Seeing the field get cleared is pretty satisfying. There's not really any depth to your purchases, but there doesn't need to be for the gameplay to fulfill it's intent here. [Shoutout to the way they replace the verb on "purchase" each time, that's a pretty great gag]
The beacon is a great mechanic, giving the player a sense of agency over how the field gets cleared. Pair that with the murals that get revealed as you clear space, and the player is left with a satisfying and intriguing object to interact with as they listen to the album.
My favorite component is definitely the waystone dialog scenes. I quite like the writing for them and they excelled at leaning into that surreal "music video" style of storytelling. I give the writing a lot of credit for how memorable I found this game.