A game I'd normally not play. But here I am, playing with a enthusiastic friend who absolutely adores Stardew. Their love can be very infectious to be sure.
Yet after over 40 hours, the beginning of year 3, married to Maru, unlocked the island's secrets, delved deep into the skull cavern many times, forged a hammer of the stars, raised dinosaurs, and helped make a farm that can produce 400,000 gold or more a month (admittedly they set up most of the farm); I came away thinking "Yeah that was decent."

Most of my "issues" are really just my biases for the things that make me enjoy a game. I enjoy becoming stronger in a game, richer even, but something that I asked myself a lot was "why?" I don't like getting power for the sake of power. The reason I don't mind grinding in a lot of games is that I'm working towards something. "I need more power because of this tough boss." If I clear the hardest challenge in the game, then I put it down. That is my cut-off point in most games. (Not to say I wouldn't replay them) So in Stardew, you have to make your own goals. There's nothing wrong with that inherently, and there are tough challenges to work towards, but I need something more concrete. Some kind of conflict to get invested in. You don't have any debt that you need to pay off, there's no real danger to the town or your farm; the only thing that drives you is you. And that really isn't enough for me, but that's just the kind of game this is.
This is a big reason why I couldn't get into Minecraft. There was never a good enough goal to engage me to the game. But at least Stardew has NPCs with their own stories and relationships, and a lot of mysteries to uncover that greatly expand the scope of the game. The feeling of progression is fairly gratifying too, earning a lot of money or leveling up a skill feels as good as it should. I also like how this is a life sim that isn't tied to the real-world clock. You can play through as many days as possible in one sitting, this is very good as it puts you in more control of the game. NPCs are a mixed bag though, which even my friend agrees to this. Some are cute and interesting, but others are just kind of jerks or a bit bland. I don't inherently have a problem with finding characters unlikable, even if they aren't a antagonist, but some of these are possible boyfriend/girlfriend candidates. They needed to be more inherently likeable or interesting. Maybe some random events that show the more interesting side to these characters sooner. Like I do get it, humans are complex. Some aren't so enthusiastic to talk to strangers. Many aren't comfortable being too open about themselves. It's sort of realistic in that way, but it still makes it harder then I feel it should be to engage with them.
The more gamey mechanics aren't too complex, which could be a good or bad thing depending on who you are. Combat isn't mindless but I would appreciate more then one special attack per weapon type, plus actual bosses. Farming definitely has the most thought, but is still easy enough to manage. Fishing can go suck a cod!!! (My friend loves fishing, can't say I'm a fan) And of course there's tons to customize with how your farm looks and operates.
Fainting in a dungeon is surprisingly harsh though. You lose a ton of items and can only get one of them back. And some late game enemies deal a stupid amount of damage. You're better off reseting if you faint, honestly (unless you got a rare item, in which case tough shit).

Stardew Valley is a relaxing game but has a edge that the more happy-go-lucky life sims (I.E. Animal Crossing) doesn't quite have. For me, the edge is a bit too dull for my liking, but if my friend asks me to play it again, then I wouldn't hesitate to say yes.

I nicknamed my hammer the "Fuck-Off Hammer" for all those flying sea serpents in the skull cavern that need to "Fuck-Off"

It’s personal

At the beginning of 2020 when everyone with a Switch was playing the new Animal Crossing I inherited my grandfather’s farm in a quaint town of Stardew Valley, have you heard of it?

I found a new life there that was everything I wanted & exactly what I needed at a time where I felt like it was my fucking duty to wait for the news broadcasts to tell me more bad news & scroll infinitely on Twitter to find more people in my same frame of mind as I was where we were all terrified & had to work in positions where business owners didn’t want to protect us & nobody cared that we were scared or that our families couldn’t stand to get sick

I came back in 2022 after losing both of my grandmas in less than a year & my grandpa needed to be placed in long term care because my family couldn’t properly care for him anymore

Recently my dad has been in poor health, avoiding hospitalization and struggling with a lot of anxiety and paranoia made increasingly worse by medicines that have been prescribed to maybe hopefully help eventually I think. We’re all scared and I’ve found myself thinking of a trip to Stardew to be with my cows and my chubby piggies and chickens and back to growing pumpkins and kicking blueberries around my greenhouse and saying hi to my little bats in the cave right behind it…

The more I want to visit my farm, the more I wish my dad could go too
A place where you can let go of your anxieties
A home away from home, but not too far

I wanted to love this game, but, man... after spending over 400 hours playing it, certain aspects have become so bad. While the game has one of the coolest endgame content i've ever seen, getting to that point feels more like a second job than a source of enjoyment and it doesn't stop there.

One major reason why I stopped playing this game is the almost impossible task of progressing with just one character. You need to play with 3-6 other characters to make any significant progression. You find yourself obligated to engage daily content such as Chaos Dungeons, Raids, and other content. This can stretch on for a considerable amount of time, that it starts to feel like a second job. It feels like that the games says, "Either dedicate 8 hours a day or spend a huge amount of money to make any progression".

Moreover, if you're not perfectly geared with the perfect stats, good luck finding any decent raid group in the high-end raids. This problem was already widely known in South Korea (where the game was released about 3 years earlier), and it's gradually making its way here too.

Then there is the card collection system. This is in my opinion one of the most monotonous activities in the game. However, you're forced to do this because don't forget, lacking good stats means no raids in the higher levels. Also not to forget is that you will need to do this for the alt characters too at some point.

I would not recommend this game better to avoid this one, if you want to start with an MMORPG, i would recommend games like Final Fantasy 14, World of Warcraft or Black Desert but stay away from this one if you don't want to waste hundreds of hours to notice that progress will be the worst grind.

Well written world, charming art, good mechanics, and a story whose end you influence over time through both small personal and large social decisions.

Roadwarden is a text based RPG that has your character arriving in a northern peninsula to take on the role as the areas new Roadwarden and for more personal and secret tasks. The area you arrive in is broken up between a few different settlements of various prosperity surrounded by dangerous forests, bandits, creatures, and the reanimated dead from the bodies that were not burned after death. It is a Roadwarden's job to protect travelers, keep communication active between nearby towns, maintain paths and roads important to travel, and to fight or scare off monsters that endangers people. Upon arriving at a small outpost that is the areas closest point back to the city and civilization you come from you meet the only two surviving guards from a former party of eight, you learn that no one knows what happened to the last Roadwarden and asking about them both leads you to find that not to many people were fond of them and some are clearly not telling you all that they know.

Your choices in the coming conversations put you into a class of either a fighter who is better at combat and whose physical abilities, training, and knowledge of some enemies can allow you to activate an innate power in certain events that will give you a better option or to point out which existing options would be poor choices. A magic user that has a certain amount of spellpower to spend each day to help them through events. Or a Scholar that can read and decipher symbols, craft items to better survive or save time traversing the roads and forest, craft weapons, and brew potions. You can also choose the kind of religion that your character follows that can give you choices or effect your knowledge in certain situations and choose a personal goal for yourself like becoming rich, helping people, finding a place to live, escaping your past, etc. Your hidden job that you are shortly told is that you were paid by the merchants guild in the city to prepare that area for them to start traveling through, trading, and establishing outposts in the region. To do that you are expected to gain the trusts of town leaders and see that they are open to agreements with the merchants, help them in ways that will strength them that can be used by the merchants, and make sure there is nothing going on that would require them to send in soldiers or church inquisitors to war against the villages or to deal with problems you let get out of control. You are given 40 days, on the normal difficulty mode, to attempt to complete as much of your employer's goals, your own personal goal, and to do as much as you can to try to get the best ending for as many people as you can if that's what you desire.

Apar from the well written descriptions, characters, and encounters, some of your choices that would just be filler in most game can come back as having an influence on the world when what you tell people, maybe unless you chose an option with (lie) as part of the text, does show itself to be true either during the course of the game or in the ending scenes of the game when you go back to the city. Choices of how you act in dreams or what your character things of themselves, their future, and their current role can lead to multiple endings for your character depending on what your personal goal was and if you fulfilled it or not. How you solve problems, or if you discover them at all, will also influence the endings for the character you meet and the future of the towns in the coming years depending on if you have gained their trust, how their culture or leaders get along with merchants, if you left them with a dangerous leader, if you helped to set certain towns up with ways to better deal with the merchants, etc.

Your ways of interacting with people or encounters go beyond just the choices you make. People will respond better or worse based on the choice of greeting you give them (friendly, playful, stoic, intimidating, or insecure) and based on the condition of your outfit, how clean or dirty you are, and if you are wounded. Having a more favorable response can help people to trust you faster or allow you a better chance if you attempt to haggle for a jobs pay. Your choice of class, your vitality level, nourishment level, and the status of your armor will also effect how well you do in combat.

Good art style and music. Nice simple interface. You have a helpful journal that details your quests and some of what you have discovered about different subjects you are investigating, a section for details on people, details on towns, and a bestiary that describes different monsters and their potential weaknesses. A forgiving and not constantly oppressive feeling time limit, no stupid time progression from saying a few words or entering and exiting a building you accidentally clicked on.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1665575745253416962

This is a game that, on paper, sounded extremely interesting to me. I really dig the survival concept and I had heard good things this game in particular. But man, I just can't get into it at all.

Let's start with the interface, it's ugly as hell and feels extremely dated. The combat is pretty weak and nothing special. Exploration was boring from what I played as there want much of interest to see, too. Visually the game is not bad but it's nothing amazing, and the ugly interface still bothers me.

Survival elements, more or less the focus here, are alright, as you have to keep track of food, water, sleep and such, as well as ailments (such as getting sick from the cold, for example). But the way certain things work is just rather dumb, such as how you collect wood by just getting next to a tree and holding a key instead of having to chop it down with an axe or something. Or torches, which you can seemingly magically lit from your inventory instead of needing to ignite them from fires or something (in fact, you seemingly can't ignite torches from fires such as campfires at all). So basically, the survival elements have this quirk where they made some things realistic but others are really gamey and I'm not fond of that at all.

So yeah I didn't really like what I played. I might give it another shot sometime (and I feel like I should go in with a more open mind) but I feel like I have other games in my backlog that would be better to scratch that survival itch, even if they wouldn't be QUITE as fleshed out in some survival aspects, so I probably will just delete it off my drive.

I was excited to try Outward since it looked similar to one of my all-time favourite RPGs – Kingdom Come Deliverance. Both are challenging and punishing RPGs, where your character is not “the chosen one” so you have to constantly learn to survive. I can get behind the idea of a game that doesn’t hold your hands through your adventure. I’m sick of uninspired titles which constantly borrow the same mechanics and concepts from other titles without adding anything original.

Outward seemed like it was going to answer that issue. I believe some of the most original development teams are indie or AA. The details put into Outward are great – you have to manage your thirst, stamina, and health as with any survival game, but there are even more things that can impact your character like disease, poisoning, curses, wounds, etc. I especially liked the idea behind the backpack, lantern, and camping systems. The backpack makes you more clumsy in fights so you can shed it at the touch of a button before fights.

And there is a coop and split-screen. We need more coop/split-screen RPGs.

So where is the downside?
Let’s begin with the combat. It’s simply not impactful or fun. You don’t feel any impact of your strikes, arrows, or spells. Stiff, fixed animations with no weight. There is no staggering of the enemies. There is no need to learn attack patterns or strategies. Enemies strike you relentlessly and all you have to do is time your strike and constantly move to decrease the chance of getting hit. Having clunky combat in a combat-based game is not a good start. They kinda tried to make it similar to the Combat of the Souls series but failed terribly.

The split second you feel you’re starting to figure things out, you get attacked by far stronger enemies and have zero chance of winning the fight. When you die, you don’t die. You just get respawned in a different __cpLocation with negative effects which means you have to constantly run back and forth since fast travel doesn’t exist. Nor do you have a mount.

This would be fine if the world was not so bland. A trip can take you around 10-20 min and you might not encounter anything during it. Outward seemingly wants you to explore, only to make sure you’re punished for it any time you try. The player is not even motivated to explore since you never get awarded for it. I’ve played for 10h and It feels like I made zero progress. Most of the side quests are also basically fetch quests or repetitive activities. NPCs also feel lifeless and from what I have seen of the storyline/lore so far is basic and not that interesting.

I want to like Rune Factory 5 so much more than I do. I've gone back to it time and time again, after playing and enjoying plenty of other games that run poorly, thinking "if I just give it a little more time, everything will click!". It never did. As much as it hurts for me to say, this game sucks.

I adore the other RF games I've played (1,2, 4, and ToD). I thought there would never be another RF after 4 since Neverland died. I bought the special edition of this game. I listened to all the voice actor interviews and I could feel how excited they were for the project. Then I played the game and was incredibly disappointed. The core of the game is still Rune Factory, so it's not unplayable, but everything is a step back from previous games. The writing was fine I guess and I liked some of the characters, but the story was weirdly paced and Marvelous thought it would be a great idea to take away the game's new gimmick mechanic for a big chunk of the second act. The fully 3D world is nice on paper, but it looks awful, runs terribly on Switch despite the fact that the game was released as an exclusive, and just feels empty. I get that they were going for a more rural feel by spacing everything out so much, but without a quicker way to move around, exploring just feels like a chore. Combat feels sluggish despite the fact that it was actually pretty cool in Tides of Destiny and serviceable in every other game. Magic is still designed like you're playing a top down title (forward beams, short range magic shields, etc.) but the space between you and your enemies makes it nearly unusable, and the abysmally slow cast rate means that even if you find a spell that works, going and hitting the monster with anything else would always be more efficient.

I want to forgive the developers for a lot of these faults. The previous RF game was released over 10 years ago. The studio that made it went under and Marvelous stepped in to put an entirely new team together to revive the franchise, so they were definitely getting back into the swing of things with the series. The thing is there was a little less than a year between the Japanese and Western releases. Now I'm not going to rant about how the localization team forced the developers to spend that time adding in same sex marriage or anything (it's a little odd that everyone overtly flirts with you now even if you're not anywhere close to being in a relationship with them but that's a minor nitpick and there are probably plenty of people who don't mind that), but that shows the development team was still working on the game after its release. Maybe the actual team moved on to the two upcoming RF games after 5's original release, and a skeleton crew of just writers and basic programmers was left to implement the changes for the worldwide release so they couldn't really fix anything, I don't know. I also get that there's a large enough subset of the game's audience that actually cares about things like same sex marriage and appreciates the fact that it's in the game now, so it wasn't like they completely wasted their time by implementing that feature. But they had from May 2021 to March 2022 to improve the game, and the only difference performance wise is that in the version we got, the load times are shorter. Because the game puts you into an area when things are still half loaded and you have to wander around for 10 seconds before the UI even shows up. It's one of the worst games I've ever played on a technical level, and I'm an ardent defender of both modern Falcom and modern Pokemon titles, so I'd say I have a very high tolerance for jank and games that are barely held together. There's just something about how shitty RF5 really is that pushed me over the edge into not being able to enjoy it. I'm aware this is an unhinged rant about a low budget farming game, but there's just so much wasted potential here that it hurts. 3D Rune Factory has worked before, and it could have worked here. The team behind the game, or at least the voice actors, were clearly passionate about the project, and that passion just went to waste. Hopefully this is just a bump in the road for Rune Factory, and 6 and Project Dragon turn out to be much better games than this.

EDIT: original review below. i played it on pc with lightning-fast loadtimes and no performance issues, and guess what? this game still kinda sucks. it made the game playable, but it didn't make it good. my kingdom for another good fuckin rune factory game.

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oof, this is a tough one to write. rune factory 4 is one of my favorite games, ever.

i knew rf5 wouldn't live up to rf4. the only way to do that would be to make a game that is rf4 with a different story/characters/setting/etc. a huge reason rf4 works so well is because everything is very quick. you can knock out an entire day's tasks in five minutes if you want to.

this game, on the other hand, suffers from long load times and really intense performance issues on the switch. i'd love a buttery-smooth pc port, and i don't normally mind jank, but it really hurts this game's pace given the repetitive nature of farming sims.

i will pick this back up, i love rune factory too much to ignore it forever, but the switch to 3d environments was something i was dreading after the ps3 game, and i was right to feel that way. the combat is sloppy and also hurt by the framerate issues. the environments are huuuuge for no reason whatsoever.

here are a couple nice things about it: i have decent first impressions of the characters. i think i will be able to grow to like them once i get to know them more. also, the intro cinematic is clearly going for a persona vibe and it totally succeeds, i watch it every single time i boot up the game. and lastly, the north american release marked the addition of actual same-sex marriage in this series. no more having to switch your character sprite and being stuck with the wrong pronouns or whatever. wooooo

that said, you still select your gender at the beginning by answering a question either masculinely or femininely, lol. baby steps i guess.

One of the most fundamentally satisfying combinations of gameplay loops make this feel so effortlessly solid just from reading the basic description that you hunt fish in a tiny roguelite loop during the day to sell them in your sushi restaurant at night. That is a perfect premise already. The presentation, music and steady supply of new systems, upgrades and tons of little gameplay twists and flourishes then elevate this to greatness and most remarkably keep a consistent fresh pacing over the almost 30 hours it unexpectedly took me to complete this, never running out of steam. It struck a similar nerve for me as Cult of the Lamb last year which I was just as hopelessly addicted to, so beware, Dave the Diver will leech your time and you won't even notice it.

An absolutely fantastic ride from start to finish with a shocking amount of variety, impeccable vibes, fantastic audiovisuals and addictive gameplay. The ending wraps up everything in a wholesome, feel good way after which you can keep playing, diving and running the restaurant. Definitely one of the most creative, original and unique games I've played in a long time.

If I had to single out some negatives, I would say that the localization is definitely lacking. Also, each of the many disparate mechanics are rather simple and straightforward. But there are so many of them, this game might as well be in the dictionary under "greater than the sum of its parts".

Thoroughly loved it, perfect summer game.