This thing can be hard as nails if you're used to games that automate everything away and reduce the level of control you have over your settlement. Even something like Dwarf Fortress can be a bit easier to pick up if you limit the scope of your operation, because your control over your dwarves is actually pretty limited and you need a manager to do anything in bulk. Ratopia gives you total control and it can be a real challenge, even on the easiest difficulties.

A brand new Ratopia player will probably do fine with the basics - it's pretty easy to maintain a stockpile of the essentials at the beginning - but your rats have emotional needs too and the game is constantly pushing you to operate on an increasingly large scale while making sure you have the infrastructure in place to support a settlement of that size. It's really easy to make quick decisions that will inconvenience you in the long run, and correcting mistakes can be costly - every task that you are not personally completing requires that you pay someone, right from the start of the game. No freebies. Not farming, not construction, and certainly not mining. The rats have to pay for services too, though, and now there's a whole ecosystem at play - a rat without a job is going to have a hard time eating or filling their entertainment need, and now you've gotta set up the infrastructure that allows you to collect taxes (because you've gotta pay rats to do some really expensive jobs) and subsidize certain goods/provide welfare for rats that are struggling.

The whole game requires this same level of diligence - it's very easy to find yourself in a situation where you don't have enough grass because you've got workshops that are just eating up the supply in huge quantities as soon as any arrives in storage, so if you don't set conditions under which certain goods can be produced - and do so early on - you're probably digging yourself a huge hole without even noticing.

On the flip side though, this means that it's really hard to compete with the satisfaction this game provides when everything is going smoothly. It's impossible to be confused about why your colony failed unless you're just wholesale ignoring all the information the game gives to you. Each failure is an obvious lesson in scalability, teaching you how and when to prioritize certain tasks, structures, and resources. Building a little rat empire where you've got a stable supply of core goods and your rats aren't filthy or hungry is a reward for perfect planning that encourages you to go just a little further out of your comfort zone.

It's gotta be the economy/political systems that make the game shine, though. Colony sims tend to be more focused on the material aspects of running a settlement, the logistics of producing enough things and getting them where they need to go. It's rare (but not unheard of) for these games to try their hand at incorporating the economics and administrative tasks of a more traditional city builder into the mix, but it rarely feels so essential to the experience as it does here. I think some players will wish the devs had leaned a little more into that side of things - the administrative services you provide are relatively basic - but this project shows a lot of focus and restraint and I think that's a tremendous strength, even if I occasionally find myself wishing for more complex production conditions on my workshops.

Really really excellent. As a world filled with characters and stories and amazing ideas, it's absolutely impeccable stuff. The first 60-70 hours I spent with the game were so consistently surprising and cool, and I'm confident a lot of moments here will stick with me forever. It was easy to be skeptical of the idea of this being open-world, but it's such a good fit for From and their uncanny ability to make players say "oh god, what is that?"

In so many ways, this feels like the greatest possible realization of From's desire to bring the experience found in classic RPGs like Wizardry and Hydlide to a wider audience. I adore it, I really do.

That said, I kinda wish I liked the bosses here more than I do? Sekiro worked for me because every fight was really quite something. There weren't an absolute ton of bossfights, but each one felt like a really fantastic display of the game's systems and ideas, and any that got reused were changed in cool, really exciting ways. Here, there's so so so many fights and a bunch of them are cool, but so many of them get repeated to a degree that I honestly started to find them less special as the game went on. I loved fighting a dragon for the first time, for the 10th, though?

It's a shame, it kinda cheapens some of the really cool ideas in here more than I'd like. The catacombs, too, kinda get less interesting as you go and at a point I just stopped doing them entirely.

But man, as complainy as I sound, I wanna stress how much I love so much of what this game does. I wasn't expecting to click with this at all, but it's a really thrilling game that has some of From's absolute best work. Some of the NPC stories, too, got me in a way none of the ones in previous games ever managed. I was kinda stunned by that, honestly. Also, goddamn, when the bosses do land, they're amazing. Just please, don't do what I did and set out to do everything you can. Know when something in here is making the game less fun to you and be OK with leaving it be.

I'd been down on From for a while there, but after Sekiro and this back to back, it's clear that they're still firing on all cylinders and absolutely full to bursting with amazing ideas, and I'm so keen to see what the future holds for them.