Watching my best friend playthrough hempuli's cursed block-pushing saga (cove-mount likes) continues to be a treat.
I'm specifically glad I wasn't the one playing for this one, because navigating the puzzle state is quite complex here. It seems like i would have gotten frustrated pretty fast.

Anyway, I'm blown away by the mechanic here, it's genius.
The most fascinating part is that you must move numbered blocks as a group. This simultaneously opens up the fascinating possibility space of multi-pushes while introducing a powerful constraint that makes you have to work even to do simple things.

My favorite level is the one that's entirely made out of 2 boxes- except for that one degree of freedom box. I love how deranged this is, it's amusing to imagine how confusing it would be out of context.

It also feels like a satisfying trial that divides the game, since the next level teaches you the secret of moving empty boxes. Using boxes as level walls was suspicious from the beginning, but i was still not prepared for how incredible this epiphany is. Stuff like this might be my favorite aspect of puzzle games.

This game is quite pretty! The highlight is the gorgeous environments, shoutout especially to the clocktower, void, labyrinth, and of course the final vista.

and that's the only nice thing I have to say about this game! Wait, i like how you have to do a cute little dance animation to gather collectibles. Ok, that really is all I'm positive on.

The gameplay is mindless, the characters are uninteresting, there's no meaning for me to find in story... there's so little personality in everything except the visuals. I found myself wondering what the team member composition of this studio was right until i rolled the credits. Did the artists outnumber all the other roles 7:1???? Were any game designers thrown in a dungeon for speaking of the forbidden concept of fun?

I always hate seeing games make things like healing and bombs limited consumables (and worse you use freely from a menu that pauses gameplay). It's not like that matters here though, my rant about these mechanics is a waste of time in a world where enemies are this easy.
Combat is almost entirely spamming attack and skills as they go off cooldown, with the occasional need for the legendary "move out of the way" maneuver. Why did they even add the shield and stamina bar lol?

The game is short (which is something i always enjoy), but it's still padded through it's quest design. Don't worry, it doesn't get to the point where you are ever like "let me play the game agaain"... especially since the combat itself feels like padding anyway.

This game makes me appreciate the way levels in other games feel like places. Seeing the hedge maze in the background at the beginning made me quite excited to explore there. Jokes on me, it's actually just 3 rooms.
The other locations are pretty much like this too. This game has no sense of navigation or traversal. I'd be happy to see some games get away with that, here it just feels like a shame.

The more i think about it, the more i realize the non-visual components of the game are bad not because they are flawed or annoying, but because they are so utterly uninteresting. Bleh that's enough of writing this review, i'm not built to be negative on games

[My thoughts on hempuli's covemount-like saga are from watching a friend playthrough not an experience of playing myself]

I adore the mechanic of this one. it's fascinating to wrap your head around it.
The early setup of tricking you into thinking you need portals to warp is hilarious.
The idea of changing warp pathing by pushing sokoban boxes is so cool. I like a lot of the puzzles that arise from it.

This game has an interesting progression where your sense of mechanical freedom advances as you beat levels and understand the nuance of warping. Then it finishes by trapping you into a limited world where you can barely warp.
The more intuitive arc would be the other-way around, but I'm pretty fond of the way this game does this.

Lil Gator Game? More like AWESOME Gator Game!

Play this! I love pretty much everything in this game...wow what a great experience! It's definitely my favorite in the genre. {that is the genre of wholesome adventure games where you wander around a cute world and make friends with everybody you meet (by helping them)}
Every part of Lil Gator Game commits to being wonderfully playful, it's all is overflowing with creativity and charm.

First, we should appreciate how this lil gator moves around. Those movement animations are adorable. The breath of the wild impression here is excellent (it's great to inhabit a world where paragliding is a standard mechanic). The whole setup of the game makes these homage mechanics feel like the children's tradition of stealing (rather than the game design tradition of stealing).

Uniquely among BOTW descendants that I've played, Lil Gator Game also takes shield surfing. I'm completely on board for that- especially since Lil Gator Game makes it even cooler. The "shields" are less fragile, more bouncy and incredibly expressive.
They've also introduced an ESSENTIAL innovation to the formula: the ability to embrace Ragdoll physics on command. This was absolutely hilarious the first time- and it stayed funny throughout the whole game. I can't believe that I actually let crumpling become a natural part of my traversal. I love it so much.

Shoutout to Rowan's placebo bracelets LMAO. I happened to play most of the game with only 1 bracelet, since I didn't see Rowan when I initially went to the great tree and water fountain. {add this to the stack of evidence that gamers don't look up}. Eventually unlocking infinite stamina is an excellent gag and appreciated quality of life for my final hour with the game.

Then of course, there's the delightful world. The nature goes hard- there's great use of elevation and trees, the water looks very nice, and I adore the autumn aesthetic. Even better than all that is the cardboard props that are destined to be consumed by the relentless destructive force of a certain heroic gator. These work very well, both thematically and as a good way to fill the world. The scrap currency is used effectively, and importantly it never feels like something you are forced to gather more of. The visceral joy of smashing props and neat customization unlocks stay exciting for the whole game.

My favorite part of the park is the playground you and your friends develop over the course of the game. It's quite satisfying to see the transformations and amusing to imagine the untold logistical feat of this construction. I'm quite fond of the idea of spending friends for each command center project- it's a solid way to reify your accumulation of playmates. It feels very fitting that the other children you recruit are only actually interested in helping with one project. One of my favorite touches is the way most of the completed NPCS exists in a quantum superposition where they are both in their island location and have joined you in the park. You get to experience making the hub area more lively without compromising the liveliness of the island.

The tasks and interactions with NPCS are definitely the highlight of the game. Dialog is frequently funny, absurdity is used to great effect, and they packed a whole lot of distinct characters into this island. The humor hits pretty consistently and there's some parts that I'm still laughing with as I write this review. I also love the nature of the things you're doing here. It's cool to get such a wide tour of takes on play. Furthermore, I have a deep respect for how much this game advocates simply talking things out with people. Shoutout to Duke and the Saint Hogarth trio {I'm especially fond of how their summer projects are actually just expressions of passions.}

Every time the gator pulls out their phone is gold. My favorite scene in the game is the group chat trying to get enough combined money to buy ice cream.

It's funny how i didn't suspect that I had started on this game's equivalent of the great plateau, the adventure actually starting with tom's text message somehow caught me off guard. Speaking of surprises, I was expecting this to be a short 2 hour game and got a nice solid 5 hours instead. Sweet!

I love the narrative arc with lil gator and big sis. The core conflict is well executed, and the reveal that she is studying to be a game developer is superb. The still-life memories scattered across the island are quite effective. The flashback traversal is a much more interesting finale than i was expecting.

I have a strong appreciation for what they set out to do here. The name Lil Gator Game is quite clever, it's very marketable but also a cheeky way for the game to wear its intent on its sleeve. I really like the way the entire scenario is framed as a game that characters are actively roleplaying.

There are two things that specifically elevate Lil Gator Game for me. {Leaving me with more than just "wow that was a great experience"}
1. The focus on play, games and what it means for people to breathe life into them. {Specifically resonant because I'm a game developer}
2. The division caused by how Lil Gator and Big Sis fundamentally have a different relationship with time.

It's quite easy for me to relate to not being able to make time for things. Even before I existed in the "world of adults", I've been acutely aware of the opportunity cost inherent to any way I choose to spend my time. I'm quite lucky that my present state as a college student leaves me with a lot of free-time. [I don't need to study and can pretty effectively complete my work in sporadic sprints, so long as I'm not suffering from a bout of executive disfunction. {The kicker is that I'm always drowning in executive disfunction. In fact, I played Lil Gator Game while in a pretty low point of depression related to not being able to get my school-work done.}]

I can also relate to the experience of watching a treasured relationship with an older sibling disintegrates as they struggle to make time for you. I moved to my current city precisely so that I could live with my older brother. Even existing in the same apartment as him wasn't enough to create any consistent bubbles of time where we could interact. We both desperately wanted to spend time with each other, but there was nothing I could do about the stressful job and relationships he was burdened with. Now he's half a country away and I somehow allowed myself to accept the reality where he's not part of my life.

Finished playing Citizen Sleeper (from jump over the age games)

I absolutely adored this game. The writing is fantastic, the systems are interesting, and the presentation rules. Citizen Sleeper starts incredibly strong, remains interesting as you follow each story thread, and ends with scenes that I found quite powerful. This game simply hit for me, it is crafted to my tastes in many ways. I loved exploring this world and I loved reading all that text. The mechanical structure from which the player engages with this content is both the greatest highlight and only place where the experience stumbles.

Had I played Citizen Sleeper at release, I could have been left with some disappointment, but the additional episodes changed my mind about quite a few things. This leaves me with very little that dampened the experience, even with plenty of things that could have been better.

Over and over in writing my thoughts in this game, I’ve returned to talking about some aspect that is “not like other games”. [I’ve actually cut a few instances of that out, and I’m not someone who usually respects the reader’s time]
Perhaps Citizen Sleeper won’t hit you as well as it did for me. Regardless, I strongly recommend it on the basis of its uniqueness alone.

I really hate writing spoiler-free generic shill paragraphs- but Citizen Sleeper surely deserves them. The game is certainly in my top 25 of all time [the specific ranking is left as an exercise for the writer]. Jump Over the Age has currently released two games (this and In Other Waters), those 2 are already enough to make them one of my favorite developers!


Time to start giving my specific thoughts on Citizen Sleeper… I have a lot of them.
{Here’s a cursed fact: I’ve spent more time writing this than I did playing the game itself!}

Citizen Sleeper Spoilers from this point onward
(EXHAUSTIVE SPOILERS! [including refuge,flux,purge])
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The star of the show is all these cycle clocks and progress counters. The multithreaded nature of how you interact with your problems and goals is incredible. Citizen Sleeper centers a concept of time, in a way that few RPGs are interested in. This design intent evokes an incredibly unique experience, one that is especially meaningful for me to engage with.

I find making life decisions quite hard. My most frequent dilemma is “How do I spend my limited time?”. I’ve lived the entirety of my life treating time as a precious resource. Each day I am overwhelmed by countless possible futures and endless things that I want to do. In order to realize one, dozens of others must be discarded. It’s difficult to empathize with people who feel they have too much time. Sometimes I feel that the concept of Opportunity Cost is imprinted into my cells, I cannot live without that burden.


Games allow us to step into the magical universe where stress is fun. It’s a safe context where I can appreciate the interesting challenge. In this strange and twisted reality, I can find myself appreciating the “evil” of systems. Now that I think about it, it’s quite remarkable that I consider calling a game evil a compliment.

That’s all to say that Citizen Sleeper’s systems feel evil, in a way that is quite special to me. I loved being overwhelmed with things I wanted to do. I loved feeling the heavy weight of the things I needed to do. I loved choosing where to spend each cycle’s dice and watching in horror as clocks progressed.

This effect is especially powerful during the beginning of the game, that’s part of why I consider the opening so strong. After the (incredibly evocative) intro, you are bombarded with pressing concerns and interesting unknowns. Arriving as an outsider who barely survived the journey, sourcing medicine to delay your obsolescence, making enough money to consistently buy food, exploring the eye, the ominous “hunted” countdown, the awakening of the sleeper’s interface with the digital layer and encountering the hunter… each of these aspects are individually excellent, and they converge to make quite the memorable experience.


I’ll give a specific shoutout to the prose and imagery in the scenes describing the digital layer, it’s sooo cool. [Descriptions of cyberspace never get old, no matter how many stories I see it in]. I love the way the writing describes this realm of connections. Hunter is an excellent threat, and I loved the way it was illustrated as a wild tangle of threads. To me this stood above all the other pressing concerns, due to the way it rejects the validity of your existence and turns what should be an empowering source of freedom into a liability. {This reminds me of Cytonics and Delvers in Brandon Sanderson’s excellent Cytoverse/Skyward series}
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There are quite a few excellent design decisions I’d like to highlight.

CONDITION- Like most health systems, you can lose some of this when you fail something. The part that really sells the sleeper experience is the automatic deterioration. This adds an inherent cost to cycles, even before you consider any of the timers. I love the way this reframes obtaining healing as prolonging a losing battle- a Sisyphean task upon which the rest of your life depends.

The genius bit that truly makes this work is how passing certain thresholds of bad condition reduces your dice pool. It’s not just dying to be scared of- the journey down there is a slow motion free-fall of failure. It’s a particularly poignant depiction of the feedback loop with declining health and the way your finite time left becomes more and more tangible as your body fails you.

The good news is that using a stablizer fully heals your condition bar. Yet the scarcity of them turns this into an interesting dynamic. How much is it worth delaying a full heal to get better value out of it? That’s a question video game players are intimately familiar with. There’s additional complications to make it more interesting: coupling action efficiency with health and the obvious fact that you don’t have the luxury of wasting stabilizer.

Every vial feels impactful. The ones you buy from the dispensary are pretty much this game’s equivalent of having to make rent payments. It’s neat that there’s only a limited amount of them, although I think the game should explicitly tell you the amount the dispensary has left in stock (instead of as an offhand reveal at the end of the sabine-yatagan questline when you get the rest of them for free). The winter light one stands out as a relief in a time of need and complement to the tragedy of discovering another sleeper’s fate. The reveal of the gardener creating the mushrooms specifically for you is amazing (and it is an essential part of the game’s intended arc, more on this later}
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DICE ALLOCATION: Citizen Sleeper has the RPG staple of skill checks, but here they feel much more respectful to the player. The twist of rolling your dice- THEN deciding what you want to do is fantastic.

First, it allows players to ensure success in the things that are truly important to them. This alleviates a lot of frustration around arbitrarily being locked out of interesting directions and failing at things it feels your character is meant for.

Much can be said about the way randomness and roleplaying are inherently coupled in the genre. On the one hand, it adds an essential uncertainty to success/failure; On the other hand, it often leads to situations where a game sabotages its own core appeal. TTRPG gamers embrace the storytelling potential of failure and power of “Yes/No, but…”- yet in the transition to the more rigid world of video games, too much failure often leads to a strictly worse experience.

Citizen Sleeper makes an excellent compromise between uncertain success and fairness to the player. Assigning dice works incredibly well in the context of the game. I like the additional layer of each die value mapping to a simple positive, neutral, or negative outcome table. The analysis is quite approachable, requiring no experience with probability or dice distributions.

During the part of the game in which dice values still matter, deciding where to spend them is quite interesting. 5s and 6s feel special and the modifiers from skills have a high impact on what you choose to pursue. Low values become an interesting risk assessment, since they’re well used on safe tasks but always doing so is an inefficient action economy.

Spending dice in Citizen Sleeper is an abnormally informed choice. You know if the task you’re attempting is safe, risky, or dangerous, you know what counters progress on success/failure, there’s a perk that lets you peek at some of the risks and rewards. The timers make their urgency countable, if something is time-sensitive you usually know exactly how much time you have.

This is the kind of transparency that you generally see in board game design. It’s an invitation to engage with the systems and explicit proof of your agency. I quite enjoy this approach and found it both refreshing for a narrative videogame and well-fitting for Citizen Sleeper.

The catch is that the gameplay systems will not surprise you. The surprises are contained to the narrative and content. It’s like the text scenes are an elevated monadic world that keeps the gameplay “pure”. The gameplay gets to manage the flow of story, but the story only gets to interface with the gameplay. New scenes will block ending the cycle, but otherwise politely wait their turn. Text scenes have a well-defined set of gameplay side-effects: create new counters/locations, lock out counters/locations, add resources to your inventory, and reduce condition/energy. Your skills and dice will never affect the outcome of a prose scene.

This doesn’t mean that Citizen Sleeper lacks surprises. I’d actually say it’s packed with them – just that they exist within a defined and ordered structure. Story threads and scenes constantly defied my expectations and took interesting directions. I think I’d even be so bold as to say that every single drive in the game has an engaging and surprising progression.

Citizen Sleeper gets a lot of benefits from structuring narrative and gameplay as distinct layers. Part of why it works is the way the gameplay explicitly exists as a wrapper for the narrative. Citizen Sleeper never has a moment where I’m annoyed by a new scene popping up- that’s the fundamental appeal of the game. It’s also incredibly easy to switch layers. It’s not jarring to go from UI interaction to reading a scene. This transition avoids loading and the feeling of wrestling active control away from the player, it feels natural.
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NEW LOCATIONS: I love the idea of having to spend several actions exploring a node before you get to meet any characters or do useful actions. That’s such a neat way of gamifying being a outsider in an unfamiliar place. It complements the systemic decision making well, it’s interesting to balance exploring unknown new opportunities with the rest of your more concrete objectives.

It’s also a way to regulate the pacing. As you have space to spend actions in exploration, you get new action sinks. It ensures that you don’t just have new story threads dumped on you- avoiding the standard RPG experience of arriving somewhere and being bombarded with new tasks. Citizen Sleeper is more careful about how it hands out story threads. New drives feel more like a reward for some investment than a moth drawn to your game-protagonist light.
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AN ECONOMY OF CREDITS, DATA, SCRAP AND MUSHROOMS: There’s only a few types of inventory items in this game. Inventory management is thankfully a concept that doesn’t exist here. It’s honestly kind of incredible how they get away with this.

It’s even funnier when I think about how much mileage the game gets out of its mushrooms. It makes sense when Emphis asked me for mushrooms, it felt like an obvious “key quest item” intentionally locked in Greenway. Yet then mushrooms just progressively become more of a standard resource. One of the pranks in bliss’ questline involves her being paid in crates of mushrooms. You can offer that you’d be happy to take some for yourself and the hilarious part of this whole scenario is that as a player at that point I actually would have been satisfied receiving a mass number of mushrooms. [I did crime exactly one time in my playthrough to steal a random shipment from the crane logistics area. I got mushrooms and at the time I considered that a great boon!]. It feels like the developers are in on the joke of mushrooms being abnormally useful, as seen in the late game scene with a throwaway line about “those mushrooms you love so much”. The best part is that it makes sense for these mushrooms to be so important, since there is an entity actively designing them as a gift.

Perhaps more intuitive is the nature of the salvage economy. There’s common scrap and uncommon shipmind fragments. Once you’ve found the right places, you can convert those into credits. Each time the ship docks, you can convert credits to some salvage rolls. I like the asymmetric conversion here. There’s a couple of scrap sinks littered throughout the game and a game changing perk to self-repair with them. The initial 2 shipminds requests which block the navigator and ankhita quests feel incredibly impactful, it felt weird to be swimming in them later. {I didn’t even see a point in selling them.

The flotilla aid quest needing 8 scrap is quite frustrating. I like the idea of a lategame quest putting strain on a plentiful resource, but if you don’t have +1 endure, then there’s no consistent way to get lots more scrap at that point. I was stuck clearing out the scrap ship and hoping for engineering tasks to drop them. Shoutout to all the ship mind fragments I got during this phase. It felt silly to have a slice of surplus time but not a way to meaningfully progress that objective.
DATA makes the player’s life easier. First of all, hacking is one of the best uses of low rolls (even more so with an interface build). Agent data converts to money nicely and Castor’s onetime purchases are quite useful. I wouldn’t say it’s overpowered, rather it’s just a nice chip on the player’s side. Part of what makes it work is the looming threat of hunter, and the power to freely hack feels like a good reward for completing the navigator quest.

{Shoutout to Castor’s introduction scene! I’m a huge fan of scenes in stories where people play a game. It’s awesome for a writer to suddenly focus their attention on the part of life that I care about most}

The Credits economy is an integral part of the game experience… until it isn’t. In Citizen Sleeper, it is inevitable to reach a point in which spending money is trivial. That’s quite a shame, since the role money plays before then is phenomenal. I love how you have to spend money to keep living. In most games, you spend money in much the same way a child does. Here you get to experience the wonders of having expenses: medicine, food and eventually Ethan’s tab. Then on top of that is the quest progression that needs large sums: bliss’ eventually not a scam business partnership, crossing the founder’s gap, and potentially purchasing shipminds. Money in this game serves as both carrot and stick incentives. I love the strain of fitting paying jobs into your cycles. It serves the game very well- feeling crucial to the mechanical decision making and thematic intent of criticizing capitalism.

The financial concerns I listed in the above paragraph deserve more specific spotlight. Your 3 main expenses get cool characters and story attached to them!

I like the progression of Sabine’s quest. The way Yatagan is handled is a pretty classic storytelling trick, that’s not a complaint- I like how it worked here.

I LOVE the “get to know emphis” drive – the story scenes are amazing. The decision to make you (the sleeper) tell the first 2 stories is awesome. It’s a clever excuse to tell some sleeper backstory- and just wow the writing here is so powerful! This game is full of excellent writing and scenes concerning sleepers, these 2 stories are the highlight. Oh yeah Emphis’ story at the end is neat as well- it’s just a little overshadowed.

Ethan is a fascinating surprise. The hunted countdown makes for a solid buildup, but there was a strange meta sense of safety from my confidence that the game wouldn’t simply end there. I was expecting to have some lucky moment of temporarily giving him the slip. Ethan simply deciding to take a drinking vacation and make you pay for it is much more interesting. It’s a great way to explicitly delay the threat for the player in a way that makes sense (without taking away the tension!) . I like the strange dynamic and characterization explored with these Ethan scenes. It’s especially cool how pathetic Ethan gets right before and after his contract is cancelled. I didn’t get to see the conclusion of his questline, because I turned off my tracker before the 2nd Essen-Arp hunter arrived. I’m pretty sure this is the only content in the game I missed. The way Ethan simply disappears in this scenario feels quite awkward.

The Bliss cargo bay quest is hilarious. I love how it requires monetary investment and time sensitive action contributions, then leaves you with nothing [twice!]. I did this quest when I was Rich and had no stake in receiving rewards, but I just adore this idea. I can imagine this being fiendishly devasting if you do it while money still matters and equally satisfying for payoff to finally come through.

Finally, I like the way the founder’s gap divides the game. It makes sense that things like disabling your tracker, finding Ashton, the start of the dlc episodes and discovering a sustainable source of stabilizer are all behind this gate. Furthermore, I love the wonder of unlocking a new section of the map- full of greenery and digital fog. The greenway is super cool – it’s great as an exciting new environment that’s a complete shift from the game you’ve experienced so far.

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In Citizen Sleeper, you are not an Adventurer. There’s no mechanization of violence or combat. You spend the game rooting yourself in one large community instead of drifting through the world. HELL YEAH, MORE RPGS LIKE THIS PLEASE.

I find this game’s focus on routines especially interesting. The gameplay layer is able to “abstract away” the tediousness inherent to this direction. This game is filled with repetitive tasks- but it can get away with that because you’re not bogged down with actually doing them. The lack of friction in interacting with the gameplay is fantastic- there is little downtime forcing the player to wait. At least 95% of your time is spent choosing or reading.

That isn’t something I consciously noticed during my time with the game… such is the tragic fate of good UX. Now that I am thinking along this angle, I’d like to shoutout the decision to represent the world through a scrolling camera and selectable UI nodes. Would it be cool to play a game where you walk through the eye? Yes! Would I probably still prefer Citizen Sleeper as it exists in reality? Yes! Have I just now realized that I love when games cut out walking? Yes!
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Hyper capitalist sci-fi settings often miss for me. Emphasis on the greed of humans feels quite close to telling me that water is wet. It’s hard to feel satirical sharpness from comically evil corporations. I keep seeing the same parable against exploitation over and over again. Luckily, I don’t have these problems with Citizen Sleeper. Aside from simply having good writing, the main thing Citizen Sleeper does in this regard is focusing on the lives of people living in the margin of space capitalism. Erlin’s Eye is an excellent setting.

Extensive focus is given too how people are exploited and crushed by companies- but more importantly is the focus on the community that’s been cobbled together at the eye. Instead of just shouting complaints, they show you a place that has meaning- despite the systems of oppression that exist within and around it.

When first learning about this game, I wasn’t too excited by the concept of sleepers. This ending up being one of the cool ways in which they surprised me, it’s a unique idea that’s explored well. I really like the distinction that you’re an emulated mind that exists in a frame- it leaves them with the standard blank check to do android storytelling, but also leaves room for some more interesting stuff. {Some cool examples: you’re character appreciating scars as proof of their uniqueness, the weird middle ground you have with your simulated senses and the already discussed planned obsolescence}

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My analytical attention doesn’t focus on sound and visuals, so don’t take my lack of words on them as an insult. The soundtrack for Citizen Sleeper is incredible- I really love the vibes it sets. I listened to it many times while writing all these words. My favorite tracks are Optic Nerve and Yesterday’s sky. The music adds so much to the experience here, I wish I had the audio awareness to elaborate on that.

I like the entire aesthetic of the game, the character art is especially awesome though. Shoutout to how the dice have custom faces to represent each number, that’s a small stylistic thing that I heavily appreciate.
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I’ve alluded to the arc your character goes through several times now. You start as an overwhelmed outsider with 99 problems. Gradually those problems are replaced with friendships. Anxiety makes way for stability. The eye becomes a place you can call home.

The game starts after your character has leaped towards freedom. They spent the entire trip flickering in the cold twilight between life and death. Considering this, It’s chilling to learn the fates of other sleepers- you were the fortunate one. It’s lucky when Dragos finds and shelters you. It’s lucky when Emphis gives you the first meal for free. It’s lucky when Sabine can source a medicine for you (and give you a vial for free). This “luck” isn’t random, it’s active kindness from others.

The real helping hand you need is getting that tracker disabled. Luckily, Feng quicky offers to help with that. All you need to do is help him out with something…. Then help with something again… then you need to wait while he goes dark… then help with something again… then help with a final task in the greenway that requires focused attention. I love the way that both of you treat each other’s problems as the less important one. From your perspective, he keeps moving the goalposts and is holding your life hostage to help with his personal quest. From his perspective, there’s a deep-rooted injustice which threatens the entire station, and disabling your tracker is something he genuinely wants to do but simply cannot prioritize. It makes for quite the great troll to the player- it’s impossible to get your tracker disabled before Ethan shows up, but you won’t know that and still prioritize it.

Anyway, finally getting that tracker disabled is a turning point. The moment this happens you’re no longer making few meaningful dice allocation decisions. Your remaining drives simply become a backlog of quests you’d like to complete. Once you have mushroom farming to, time is no longer finite.
It’s not just that the sleeper’s life becomes stable. The player becomes Super Sleeper TM. By end-game, you have a nearly maximized build- defined by the 1-3 things you don’t have yet rather then what you choose to specialize in. Now I was the “lucky” kindness helping people in need, except I was a relentless machine who wakes up simply to solve others problems. Quests in this game feel incredibly different depending on if you do them as Citizen Sleeper or Super Sleeper TM. (I didn’t even meet Lem + Mina or Bliss until I was Super Sleeper TM)

At first, I was incredibly annoyed with the way the excellent tension simply deflates. It feels like the most interesting part of the game was taken out from under me. I no longer agree with this kneejerk reaction, but it was a strong thing souring me on the game during a phase of my playthrough.

First of all, the systemic tension is not the most interesting part of the game. It’s the writing and that’s not even a contest. The freedom from pressure in late-game means that you get to do everything. The game creates the expectation that you’ll have to make hard decisions about what to do- this conception is initially accurate and then eventually takes a hit from a friendly sledgehammer. In fact, the game being Evil is simply an illusion, it’s not only incredibly fair but designed in your favor.

Citizen Sleeper is a one playthrough game. It’s possible to fail quests, but I didn’t experience that. In my playthrough, I didn’t just win, I finished without having to make any sacrifices. No compromises, no regrets, no paths not taken- I experienced all the content in the game. {Except for the aforementioned late “Hunted” stuff after Ethan offers his protection and not being able to get enough scrap for the flotilla aid quest}

Surprisingly, this is a positive of the game for me. I’m a contrarian who dislikes branching content in games. I prefer my playthroughs of games to be as exhaustive as possible. It’s weird that losing one of my favorite aspects leads to a game more to my tastes. In this sense, Citizen Sleeper pulls off the experience of “having your cake and eating it too”. I got to experience the struggle of having to choose AND I didn’t end up missing out on anything. I’m still mulling over how it was possible for the game to pull this off.

I was further won over by the realization that the experience of becoming Super Sleeper TM is intentional.

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We must live and struggle against systems that want to spend us. To do so we must cradle a fragile hope- one that can be easily dropped and effortlessly crushed. Our lives are defined by a recurring choice, one that is new each time it arrives. When do we risk leaping into the unknown and when do we stay to build to build something worthwhile? Choose the air and its chaos will eventually pass. Choose the ground and its stability will eventually pass. The places that accompany our journeys have lives just as we do- ever-changing and ultimately temporary. This is what Citizen Sleeper is about.

The most impactful choices in the game are its endings. Each one presents you with a variation of “Should I leave or stay here?”. There are 2 things that make these shine: the vastly different context of each choice and the stellar writing in these scenes. I’ll go through them in the sequence that I encountered them.

THE GARDEN: The AI entities in this game are a clear highlight for me. Navigator is my favorite character and discovering Gardener is my favorite reveal. If I was willing to spend more time writing, I’d dedicate an entire section to them. I love how grandness of navigator’s true form and emphasis on how much they’ve lost. I love the concept of the gardener, it’s part of why I find greenway so compelling.

I love the recuring dichotomy between digital freedom and the physical tether. This idea reaches its peak when the gardener invites you to join the chorus. The choice presented here is incredibly compelling, I adore the setup of this scene. There’s the pull to join them- to transcend- and the pull from Riko – reminding you of what you’d be abandoning. I love the unbridgeable gap of understanding on both sides. The Gardener would never understand why you would refuse and Riko would never understand why you “died”. Neither of them would ever understand what you had to give up or even the nature of the choice you just made. I really like the way the writing sells what it means to choose your tangible life here.

This is the only leave option that I truly choose, the rest I just picked because I wanted to see the scene and knew the game would let me reenter the save and pick stay.

Ambergris into the Starward Belt:
I love Ankhita’s quest. The Ashton encounter is especially impacful- shoutout to the contrast between the lively greenway environment and the violence that occurs there; shoutout to the way you don’t get to control what your character thinks here- all subsequent interactions with ankhita are tainted by this traumatic event Then it’s an even more interesting decision to bring her back in as the one more job in the cargo bay. It’s cool to connect these 2 drives and even cooler to interact with ankhita after your character considers her a killer.

Sidereal Horizon:

I didn’t ever care about obtaining a ticket for the sidereal. I was just doing my Super Sleeper TM thing and finishing off quests. Due to when I started clocks, the ship ended up leaving during the purge episode, an amusing coincidence. {that last timer is excessively long- I bet without the dlc content it could be easy to just have nothing to do while it ticks if you start it too late}
The name of this colony ship also constantly reminded me of my favorite boardgame- sidereal confluence. {this was made worse by the fact that I went to go play that game the night I finished citizen sleeper}

Anyway, lem & mina are cool. It’s really fitting to do this quest as Super Sleeper TM, since you’re like an angel that just comes into the family. I like the idea that you have to watch mina just so lem can work.

Shoutout to the writing of the leave with lem+mina ending, I love the way they focus on how the sound of ship’s systems will accompany you as your body loses to time.


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I appreciate the way the additional episodes trigger quest clearly announces itself as late-game content (which you start on your own terms). That’s especially important here, because it wants your full attention and is designed for Super Sleeper TM. These episodes are what ultimately changed my mind on the player becoming Super Sleeper TM.

Firstly, Refuge reintroduces an urgent timer. More interestingly, it presents you with an ambitious undertaking, when you’ve been spending your time so far helping individuals. The approach of breaking the aid heist into several tasks is cool. I found the scenario pretty compelling, although I think it’s missing some extra systemic wrinkle to make it really shine. It’s good at evoking the urgency but didn’t actually ask me to make any interesting decisions.
Helene and the council dynamics feel pretty underexplored, although their concern did successfully leave me unsure if running past the cordon was a good idea.

It is thus funny to start the flux episode and watch as the cordon immediately becomes irrelevant. Seriously though, the intro of this episode is cool. The flux is quite the interesting threat, I like how the 2nd episode rides off this mystery instead of another urgent timer. Interacting with the 3 flotilla factions is neat as well, they’re interesting {like all characters in this game 😊}

Purge is an excellent finale to the game; I love how they brought in most of the characters still left on the eye. It feels much more like a conclusion of the whole experience rather than the way other endings are off-shoot branches that terminate. I really like the framing of “this is the last time you’ll make [this leave-or-stay] choice”. The decision has more weight to it because the previous 3 endings all ask you to decide if the eye is a worthwhile place to choose. Each time I stayed, I grew more certain that the eye was my home THEN these episodes roll in with the flux, and say “Would you still choose the eye if it’s future was uncertain?”. By reminding you that there’s no such thing as complete security, the whole experience of becoming Super Sleeper TM no longer feels like a misstep or classic video game progression fantasy.


This leads the game to end on a much more profound note. The eye is still worth choosing even without its offer of stability. You can’t choose a risk-free path and it’s still worth building in places that are temporary.

Food is one of those supposedly universal things that we can all bond over our love for. Unfortunately I'm not really a food fan. I have a significant mental block around trying new food, and eat a very limited diet. {Luckily, there are some meals I enjoy and just enough of them that I can avoid going insane from lack of variety. } Often when I see dishes outside my comfort zone they actually look gross to me. I usually at least enjoy most of my meals but sometimes I resent having to eat and start to think of it with the same contempt as one reserves for Sisyphean tasks like laundry and dishes.

My relationship with cooking is strange. I struggle to learn physical skills and don't have a strong love of food to fuel my motivation to learn. Sometimes in the right mood, I can appreciate cooking from the perspective of it being an interesting challenge- but I don't have a strong enough interest in food for this mindset to really take root. The strength with which i despite trying food makes it quite hard to experiment. Then it's easy to get frustrated because I have trouble following even the most basic instructions or common sense.

All this preamble is to explain why i was especially interested in getting around to trying out venba. Yes you read that right! I love playing games focused on subjects that I'm apathetic towards, it's a great opportunity to discover how something is actually interesting. I also love learning about new things, so venba presents a 2 for 1 deal because both cooking and indian culture are equally unfamiliar to me

I've played a few teaspoons worth of cooking games {definitely not enough to feel like I have a solid understanding of the genre though]. Venba feels distinct from those, in the way it makes each dish feel like an event.

It achieves this in several ways- each level is accompanied by a banger music track, a unique context, and a different flavor to how you engage with the instructions.

The slightly trolly nature of instructions in this game is perhaps my favorite part of the experience. I got a good laugh from quite a few of these. I love the conviently obscured sections of the recipe book, having to put in the minor mental effort to fill in the gaps is quite neat, it does a suprising amount of heavy lifting in making the gameplay more engaging. Instructions not giving you the whole picture of what you need to do is definitely an experience i can resonate with.

This style of difficulty works especially well for the context of the first level. It's an excellent way to capture struggling with some extraordinarily simple while feeling unwell. {I somehow made a mistake here that required restarting like 3 times which was amusingly fitting for this interpretation}

The level where venba has to actively remember things is quite neat. For some reason i was expecting the ingredient memories to escalate into full zebra puzzle style logic. That would have been excessive and not fitting for this experience - although would have enjoyed a game that dialed the complexity into more absurd territory.

The kavin level where you look at the recipe book and it's all in tamil ( that's no longer presented as english to you) is pretty clever. First of all, that's a hilarious troll to the player, and secondly it's a cool way to evoke the perspective change.

The dinner feast level is obviously mechanically the worst one. You're just pushing the A button when prompted with no cognitive layer {and none of the dishes in this game have an execution layer}. I'm willing to let this level slide though, because the sting of getting ghosted after making such an elaborate dinner hits well. {Perhaps if this was a game where the concept of difficulty existed, then this "all for nothing" could have the potential to hurt more, but it works fine here

I like the way the final level asks you to keep a mental stack at first- and then you practice a bit and it becomes an intuitive process by the last one. This captures the one or two times my mom has shown me how to cook something pretty well. At first i'm like "slowdown buddy you said too many steps at once", but then the process is simple enough that even i get a grasp of it soon.


Gameplay-wise, the only other thing here is dialog- with some occasional binary options for what you say. I'd say these options very slightly contribute to the game. They're subtle because they're not choices- it's just aligning the nuance of what you're saying.

Venba's presentation is fantastic. I love the music, it adds an incredible vibe to each dish. The visuals are just as good, the distinct art style is a great fit and works wonderfully for the scenes of the story. The standout part of the graphics is the food, even I found it dazzling-impressive given that i consider 70% of all food gross. If I enjoyed the food visuals...then I can't imagine how much of a treat it is for someone who finds all this food appetizing.

It's a shame that many of the scenes in this game have 1-3 second loading screen transitions between them (at least on xbox one where I played). I of course don't know the technical challenges specific to this game, but surely the right amount of optimization magic could have removed these. They're not even particularly annoying or eggregious- this just feels like a game that shouldn't need loading screens.

That leaves the story, and this time i saved the least for last. I respect the narrative here, but it doesn't really have that much for me to appreciate, let alone ponder. The intent and delivery are both solid , but there's just not enough for me here. The conflict is just too simple. It's not interesting enough, and that's not a fault of what the narrative chooses to be about. This feels much more like an execution issue than an intent issue

The narrative highlight is the way each dish is used as a story beat, but the storytelling beyond that isn't strong enough to make it all feel like it comes together into something meaningful. Calling this aspect lackluster feels a little mean-spirited since it's so sincere and earnest in its attempt.

I'm glad to play games that want to tell stories like this, it's overall a win as a debut narrative game.

I think i ended up having a bit too harsh an opinion on turnip boy commits tax evasion, the lackluster gameplay and timewasting structure really soured me on the experience and made it harder to appreciate any of the ways it could have charmed me. Regardless, this sequel is better. This one felt worth playing and is almost a game I like.

I like how Turnip Boy Robs a Bank leans into being an off the rails sequel. Tax evasion is a goofy lil game, this one is wild to the point of making the former game seem grounded. It turned out to be easier to vibe with this one.
In both games, i think the humor often misses for me, but here it's able to land it's few hits better. There's 2 or 3 jokes in this game that I absolutely adore [shoutout to the picture you take in the sewers ]. This game also does a better job executing the strange balance of doing ethically questionable things while helping a bunch of people with their random requests. There's a little more of "yeah you're just straight up doing crime now have fun" and a little less of Turnip Boy just being an asshole (which was especially noticable in the first game with the tearing up any doccuments gimmick, although that was otherwise amusing).

Turnip Boy robs a bank makes some interesting structural decisions. The elevators bringing you to rooms, cop timer, and upgrade system could be described as a "roguelite" direction, but the game isn't truly interested in that. The only raandomness here is the elevators- which aren't leading you to generated floors. No they're specific static floors, but their entrances are mapped to random elevators. Then the only consequence for dying is losing most of the money you had collected during that bank run. Finally there's the matter of the timer. You'd think it's a risk-reward system to push your luck for how much loot you can collect... but it only works in this way before you actually let it run out- and then realize that the spawning cops isn't actually a signifcant threat to you and you can carry on with your life (but there's still a limit on how much money you can hold, so you still have some rhythym of returning to the warehouse).

The moral of the story is that these systems is just a side spice in whatever these devs were cooking, .... and somehow it kinda works? This structure somehow softens the annoyance of all the fetch quests, but like in such a bizarre way that surely it's just a coincidence. Now moving all over the map and returning places feels much more naturally part of the rhyhtym of the game. It feels like you're hitting secondary objectives along the way, instead of going out of your way for them- which makes a world of difference. Then somehow i found the cadence of occasionally returning to the warehouse quite reasonable, even though all logic says that would be a tedium that hurts the pacing. The mechanic where you recycle weapons to unlock new default weapons is interesting! I don't think it feels that impactful with the powerful weapons the game hands out like candy (especially with the soul collecting weapons), but then i still engaged with it an occasionally grabbed weapons i otherwise wouldn't have so it's a success i guess? Then there's the way the cash progression scales, somehow tuned in just such a way to make you not feel like you really have to grind, but also successfully padding out the game.

Hopefully you're seeing the pattern here, these devs were doing some dubious cooking- but no matter how suspicious I am of these ingredients they actually ended up with something edible and perhaps even slightly enjoyable.

Speaking of slightly enjoyable, that's what the moment to moment gameplay is. The fast pace does so many favors for the game, but it's still not remotely interesting.

The gameplay is serviceable enough that it doesn't tank the experience. There's no real sense of challenge, but then in return there's no sense of frustration. It's able to slide off game-feel and frantic pacing. The low point is the bosses which suck- although one of them has a really out of left field gag in it's fight that was pretty funny.

The devs liked these bosses so much that you have to fight them all again for the ending sequence. On it's own, that would have been questionable, but not too annoying due to how easy the game is. Yet then after that is the space sequence- which is the only non trivial thing in the game... fail it and you have to do the bosses and dialog again. WHY??? This last part of the game has 0 respect for players. I shelved the game after i discovered this and simply watched the rest of the ending sequence on youtube. It's a shame the devs would do something so dumb here, because otherwise the ending sequence would have been a highlight. The vocaloid song while dodging the alien and credits song are great, and the whole sequence feels like one final going off the rails for a game that's been relishing being off the rails the whole time.

Finally, the music in this game goes hard. That's the highlight of the experience for sure

It's pretty hard to sell me on a story that's not interested in using words. I love words, they're the main way a story can deliver the greatest thing I value (interesting ideas). I generally reject that "a picture is worth a thousand words" although I do concede that visuals are more efficient at being evocative

That's enough of that- I enjoyed my time with Gris. It doesn't need to communicate to me to be successful... I can simply appreciate it. Wow this game is gorgeous.

I love how Gris uses color. It's amazing the magic they work under such a restrained palette. Each time the game loses one of its color constraints is a glorious explosion of beauty, and I love how each successive enviornment exists to help you appreciate the chromatic climax of the previous. I was especially surprised at how impactful they were able to make blue, even after a heavy use of green that looks a little like blue sometimes. Yellow is definitely the weakest of these, although it's moment is still cool and it's still used well in the final level (I guess the disapointing part is the way yellow is used for the rest of the water level, that felt a bit lackluster). The way colors are handled here feels like it maps well to a lack of emotional balance. New highs come all at once, colors overpower but do not erase each other, each shift changes your relationship with the world- with this instability there can be no world that exists in isolation from one's current mood

I adore the distinctive style of the enviornments. These places are full of cool designs- in the architecture, plants, and decorations. I loved the progression of levels here, each one replaced the previous as my new favorite. It sure is a pleasure to play an environment traversal game where each section is a banger

The gameplay is servicable. It achieves the most important thing of never becoming annoying or noticeably tedious. The abilities are well used throughout the adventure. The box transform is hilarious, and they did a surprisingly good job of justifying it's existence every so often. It's interesting how the midair jump is both subtle (when used as part of normal traversal) and flashy (when used with red petals). The swimming is nice, although it wears a little thin during the fish chases specifically. My biggest complaint regarding gameplay is that the optionial collectibles contribute little value to the experience, i could see myself arguing for them to be cut.


It's quite interesting how Gris oscillates between being quiet and loud. It's hard to say which side I prefer, since the game does both of them well. A lot of what makes the pacing work here is the harmony and contrast between these 2 ends of the spectrum.

I have a tradition of downloading a wallpaper for every game I enjoy. It's amusing to think that literally every moment of this game could be screenshot and be wallpaper worthy.

This game didn't really impress me, although it was worth playing. The main value was how entertaining the game is, there's some great gags and gaudy moments. In my thoughts on To the Moon, i mentioned that Eva and Watts were obviously not the focus but a highlight regardless. It feels like finding paradise decided to commit more to this- at the expense of the character relationship that's core to concept of the game. Faye is only interesting for what she is, and Sofia feels like a nothing character.

It's a bit tiring how much of the story is focused on someone else completing the main character- even if the resolution did end up being "she was your own inner strength all along". To the moon got a pass because of it's really heavy hitting twists around the relationship, finding paradise doesn't quite earn the same pass for me and it's difficult to understand why
If i ever make one of these snapshot biography games, it will be my sacred duty to add more complexity and beacons to a person's life than just one or two singular people.

Finding paradise fails in making colin's life story interesting. I got to a point playing this game where it felt like it was starting to drag on a bit. Although to the game's credit, shortly after that the faye twist activated. It is a satisfying twist, i was wondering who in the world would just follow a friend around in everything they do like that- and imaginary friend fits perfectly. It's the kind of twist that fits very well with the scenes you've seen throughout the game. I also like the ultimate intent and conclusion of this idea, to contrast it with the role sigmund corp is playing- while realizing the answer is to give power to her.

It's a neat idea and a solid execution of it, but those aren't enough to really make the story hit for me. Perhaps the story is missing a powerful 2nd layer, perhaps the big scenes of this game just didn't do enough the heavy lifting for me, perhaps i'm the weird one who doesn't emotionally resonate with most things anyway

I think the music's good, although i found it got a little repetive and slightly grating. The big moment music is consistently great but the more bread and butter tracks are where my problem is. Also the one lyrical track both doesn't have as great a moment attached to it, and wasn't as immediately enjoyable. (perhaps it will grow on me if i listen to it more, some lyrical tracks do that for me)

The memento puzzle mechanic didn't hit despite being mechanically more interesting than the tile flipping in To the Moon. Didn't feel worth a moon this time, and i got more annoyed by it's failure to reach any level of thinkyness.

I like the setup of what his wish is, it's conceptually more interesting than johnny's wish was. So much of this game feels like it was a solid direction to go with in a sequel, but i think i'm left with the impression that it needed to seperate itself more. I look forward to imposter factory which i predict will be more interested in doing that.

I'm always excited to try more alchemy games- it's one of my favorite themes. This game was a special treat due to its incredibly unique core system. Ingredients corresponding to paths of movement on a map of potion effects- Wow that's fascinating!

The alchemy map traversal system shines due to the focus on a wide and goofy cast of ingredients. There's so many hilarious, strange, awkward, and interesting paths. Spending time with this game is an exercise in learning to appreciate these herbs,mushrooms and crystals. It's incredible how even the most wasteful loop-de-loops, spirals, and paths that turn back on themselves have their moments. I want to really empthasize how memorable the ingredients are here. It's quite satisfying both to become more familiar with them and discover new ones

The resource management aspect forces some occasional additionial creativity and decision making. Sometimes you'll be forced to adapt to what you have on hand, sometimes it's worth taking the scenic route to conserve scarce plants. What's even better at slightly shaking up your map decisions is the experience books. The experience trying to figure out how to fit in the ones that you judge to be conviently along the way synergizes with the odd arsenal of plants quite well.

I like how the threat of bleeding ingredients encourages creating efficient recipes. It's also neat how progress leads to some better ways to make things. I especially like the introduction of the oil map- it's definitely a severe case of missed potential that there's not more maps. If they wanted to get wild then an advanced mechanic that involves switching maps while a potion is in progress could be awesome. {Although i see why they wouldn't do this, it invites quite a few problems}

The mechanics of adding base to move towards the center for free and using the mortar and pestle to decide how much of an ingredient's path to manifest are quite solid. Although, as a physical action to perform the mortar and pestle SUCKS. I don't know if my thumb or joystick hates me more for playing this game. What a terrible repetitive motion. I can see how it fits the game, especially for constructing partial paths but at the very least they need a tool to automatically fully grind things.

Another way this map business works well is the effect strength mechanics. The level III effects encouraging precision is a good thing to ask of the player in this system.

I find myself thinking of all the pieces of this alchemy system and wow do they work together well. Now just a cool idea, but a good execution too!
The feature of being able to save recipes is essential . Without them the entire game would fall apart under the mind numbing repetition of potion brewing. The system works best when you're exploring the map or trying to make a specific potion for the first time. Even with recipes, depending on my mood it can feel like the game's just too tedious and wasting my time. I definitely can't play arbitrarily long sessions of this game the same way I can for so many other games

Having to remake substances again is only barely tolerable because of recipes- having to manually brew some of those potions again would actually be insane. Especially due to the baffling choice to make each tier of substances have 2 branches- each of which consume 1 of the previous tier crystal. It's quite annoying, and the salt in the wound is having to recraft alchemical salt if you run out. Auto Recipes for substances that recursively craft the potions and other substances you need is a feature that would improve this experience a lot. Better yet, just make the alchemist guy who occasionally visits sell substances you've made. It's a bit of a shame that recrafting substances feels like such a waste of my time, because on the first time they're quite a rewarding/suitably daunting task


I quite enjoy the discovery aspect of this game- uncovering fog on the map and being introduced to new stuff through progress. Unfortunately both of those things are finite- the alchemist path progression goals take you comfortably beyond content limits. Speaking of that, chapter X is actually insane. Reach 15 popularity level... are these devs out of their goddamn mind? I enjoyed my time with this game and was intending to see it through to the end, but I had to drop it after realizing that I'd be mindlessly grinding for hours to acheive that final sprint.

I'm curious what the dropoff rate on the alchemist's path completition is. Let's look at the steam achievement percentages
Complete Chapter I - 57%
Complete Chapter II- 42.6%
Complete Chapter III - 30.4%
Complete Chapter IV- 20.3%
Complete Chapter V- 13.1%
Complete Chapter VI- 9.3%
Complete Chapter VII- 6.9%
Complete Chapter VIII - 5.4%
Complete Chapter IX - 3.1%
Complete Chapter X- 1.1%

Let's put that into perspective. 20% of steam stardew valley players have completed the community center. 2.5% of steam Shenzhen I/O players have beat the game. 8.4% of steam terraria players have gotten the ankh shield, 7.7% the cellphone. 10% of steam celeste players have gotten all red strawberries. All of these are higher than the amount of people who have finished the last chapter of alchemist's path.

Part of the problem with the later alchemist path chapters is they present daunting goals after the game has already ran out of steam. It seems like the devs are currently developing more content and features for this game, perhaps the latter part of alchemist's path is speculative for when these additions are done.


I played this game on Xbox. This is very obviously a pc game that's been ported- i groaned when i opened up the game and saw that i was controlling a cursor with my joystick. The UX actually wasn't as bad as i was expecting it to be- the quick radial menu and toggle between free/snapping movement do a lot of heavy lifting. Still unideal though. The flaws are most noticable once you're in endgame with pages of herbs and recipes. {Also why do the recipe bookmarks overlap each other like that, it's stupid that buying more recipes will at some point straight up obscure ones you have}.

This game has a remarkably long startup time

The slow-burn player driven pacing is nice. I generally prefer stressful games, but this works well here. It fits the platonic idea of a patient alchemist studying their craft and servicing customers as a supplementary routine.

There are only 2 music tracks in this game. Lol lmao. Yeah i muted it pretty fast and just listened my own music. The art style is unique and they did a fine job , but it doesn't feel particularly significant to my experience. There's a pleasant variety of character designs. The dialog is serviceable but not particularly interesting. There's a slight degree of intrepretation for what potion people want, but it's mostly them fairly directly telling you. I think it's better that way, but it's hard to tell. Maybe there's some potential in this component, although i did have a few slightly frustrating moments trying to decipher the few unintuitive ones already shrug.

I like the presentation of haggling- the way the conversation topics are presented from the perspective of someone searching for suitable small talk is pretty good. Other than that, haggling leans more towards a boring mechanic than an exciting one.

I adore the excited expression characters make when you offer them a potion

It annoys me that they left UI in the game for shop upgrades since there are none you can obtain. I guess it's either vestigial or speculative. Either way it breaks a promise to the player