Really solid resource management / builder with a spin on the typical entries in the genre. You build in the sky and fly your whole town around in order to explore, meet the main goals of the game, and gather resources. You have to deal with extra mechanics like the speed of your town, and the tilt caused by the weight of your buildings, which means you need to focus on your footprint and symmetry. It feels really innovative, and was a neat mechanic to make you think about where you place things.

The resource management isn't super difficult, and it allows you to focus on testing different configurations of your city, which is encouraged, and exploration. Your city naturally grows through the exploration, and as you get newer tech and research better upgrades, you can continuously build towards a better city, remodeling and reconstructing to deal with the tilt or the different required citizen resources. Compared to games like Cities Skylines where your initial build can often inhibit your city's performance later on without clear forethought, you can easily fix small things, or deal with problems easily, rather than having your city slowly collapse because you had to move a police station.

The exploration and goals are pretty cool, and you're pretty much getting new resources throughout the game, and dealing with new ways to become more self sufficient. It's pretty well balanced, and you can become completely self sufficient by the end of the game. That said, the game does have some confusing numbers that don't perfectly line up the way you need them to for the various production houses that work with eachother, and when you upgrade to better efficiency it can be confusing to calculate how many you need of something. That's really my main complaint, though. There's an over abundance of two resources in the latter half of the game, which was kind of disappointing after the first resource reward was so nice, but it doesn't really change anything so it's okay. Besides those two things, the system is pretty solid and was fun throughout the whole game.

It's a visually attractive game as well, and the whole production feels clean and in sync. Feels really professionally done for an indie game produced by a smaller studio.

It is a bit short at 8 hours, and twenty five dollars feels like a bit much. I got it for 10, and that feels like a really good deal, but if you like these kind of games and you are hunting a game that you can finish in a day/weekend, I'd seriously recommend this. Definitely if it's on sale below 20.

Decent game. It's pretty, pulls you in, and builds some cool gameplay ideas. Also, a cat follows you around all the time, so...

The overall art direction is pretty solid. Not played a lot of games with this sort of illustration style for assets, and I think it aids the message and overall tone of the game. The art is pretty consistent throughout, and I think it stays pretty attractive.

Audio is fine. The overall SFX and character sounds are decent. The music gets a little repetitive and annoying occasionally, but I think it's solid.

Story is okay. I think it's worth it for a playthrough but most of the characters are not amazing, just competent. They certainly feel real and you can empathize with them, but by the end I was mostly tired of the story, looking to end it. The story of life and passing through is meaningful and the game talks about it in several dimensions, which I think is great, but like others have said the back end lacks, I think in both the characters that you get and the overall pacing.

The gameplay is weak. I'm all for mindless resource gathering, and complex crafting systems, and wandering around a map just looking for different resources to progress, but it takes it to a different level of tedium.

The game makes you feel like you're progressing and building new things and exploring new places, but every action you take for crafting, or gathering resources, is just irritating. They're all tiny minigames comprised of holding the e button then letting go at the right time and usually some amount of waiting. I completed the game and got all the achievements, but I was fatigued of it halfway through. The progression and the story kept me going, but if I hadn't had clear and present goals it probably would have fatigued me out.

The game uses these resource and crafting systems as the primary goals of quests and as a means to segment content, which means that the majority of goals in this game boil down to 'visit place to get [resource]/craft [product]/return [product] to quest giver'. This is fine if you know what you're getting into and you're ok with it. Again, not hard, just tedious.

The rest of the gameplay is mainly composed of the platforming aspects. I suppose it qualifies as a platformer, since the other way the game segments content is by locking valuable items behind some movement upgrade. Despite this, the platforming can be annoying. It's fun how fast you can go, and jumping and flying around is nice, but there's some minor quirks that result in you missing somewhere you think you could've landed, and having to go back to try again, over and over. If it just offered a little more lenience / control, it would be significantly less aggravating.

Beyond that, there are tiny things that prevent this game from being a 4 star that seem to be due to not enough time spent polishing. I personally completed a lot of the non-essential ship upgrades at the end, as I didn't need them / didn't have them available until after I'd sent away my spirits and went exploring. Rather than proper animation stretch frames the player character and others sometimes are simply stretched and squeezed for some amount of frames to display motion. Fine, but it was distracting and my main problem with the art. I also felt some of the animations were janky and did not fully blend into each other.

The characters often repeat the same dialogue over and over, even the ones you have to visit several times. The characters will have a favorite food, but their animation won't be them eating their favorite food. Seems like a minor thing, but a character that hates carbs has an animation of them devouring carbs, which is immensely frustrating when you spend half the time catering to their unnecessarily precise food desires.

ALSO: Almost all the achievements can be done in a single playthrough, but two are dependent on which decision you make, which means that you minimally have to do two playthroughs to get all the achievements. I consider this game to have very very limited replay value unless it's right up your alley, so I think this is just annoying and a poor decision by the devs considering the rest of the game is incredibly linear and I don't believe this decision even has any major effect on the characters involved.


TL;DR:

Solid game, I think you should play it for the art, story, and characters. It creates a solid narrative and world, while building on cool gameplay ideas (the ship, cooking for your passengers), but a lot of the gameplay is rooted in tedium or minor aggravations. The story and gameplay shines in the front half, lingers in the back half, and has some weird quirks and abrupt endings that feel more like lack of polish / rush than deliberate decisions. I'd up my rating if the back part felt less like a todo list and more like a proper finish.