devtrackers.gg
Here are some of my initial thoughts on the game after playing for a few hours, so most of my experience is in the starting area, with brief visits to two of the other biomes...
Strengths:
Random Gen - this seems pretty seamless to me so far. The transitions between areas are very natural looking, the the POI blend in well. The forests in particular are really well done.
Graphics - I know, the models and pixelated style of the graphics looks like it is out of s PS1 game. But despite that artistic choice, the lighting, weather, and color palette are really nice and give the game some great atmosphere.
Music/sound - also pretty good.
Building/Crafting system - you unlock recipes as you collect new materials (the lore is that you have forgotten most details from your previous life, but it will come back to you as you experience the world around you). You will build a craft bench which allows you to creater better objects, and it creates a radius for your base around it. They have some neat mechanics like upgrading the level of your craft bench by building other implements nearby, which in turn unlocks new recipes for both crafting and building and the ability to upgrade the level of existing gear. Building structures is intuitive and relatively quick depending on how complex you want to go.
Melee Combat - so far it's pretty fun. I am just now getting in fights with some of the tougher critters.
Progression - as you use different tools and skills you level them up. Sprint around a bunch it levels up your speed and stamina efficiency, using axes increases the damage you do with axes, blocking increases the damage you can block. Its nice and simple for now, not sure if there are active /passive skills or anything planned.
Food system: this is usually unbalanced in most games, I like how they did it here. Eat food, and it temporarily buffs your max health and stamina based on the quality of the food. You can eat three different types of food at once, and the effects stack. The buff degrades over time, but not too quickly so it's not a chore staying fed.
Needs work:
Background blur - the blue distance is pretty close, it could be pushed out a bit more.
EDIT: apparently there is a blur setting you can adjust
Ranged combat - not sure if this improves as the game progresses, but the speed of your arrows is pretty slow and the drop is pretty severe. This is probably intentional because bows do quite a bit of damage compared to other weapons (at least early on) so it takes more skill to hit moving targets, but it seems a bit off. I would trade a bit of damage for something more responsive
NPC interactions - there are crows that kind of act as your guides. It would be nice to have a log of conversations to go back to, because the little buggers fly off after telling you what to do next so you can't just go ask again...
EDIT: I was wrong about this one - there is a log of NPC conversations in the same place you view your active effects...
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