Recent reviews by Dagda

I've gotten to try out Stardew Valley before, and this seems to try and tap into the calm and relaxing vibe of it.

However, onboarding to me felt awful, with flashbangs of information in the beginning that easily got buried. The narrative also wasn't exactly gripping me.

When a quest is starting to feel as though each step creates 5 more to me, it doesn't feel like it's that respecting of my short time.

"Trade in burial certificates, sure. Wait, you can't get any money. Okay, what about flesh I was already told to sell? You need a stamp for it. Two different ways to go about it. Okay, What day is it? The dial tells me little. I go to sleep...Oh wait, you can time it? Guess that's ni- what is the thing about the ghost fella? I just want to solve the first problem I was presented with, that being the stinking church! What do you mean I can't collect berries? Oh, now I can because it's randomly bombarding me with info. Where the hell do I craft this? Why do I need nails for this ugly thing, can I craft them? No? Okay I guess I can't cut these trees because I need "technology" ..."

It's not in exact chronological order, but this is generally what my experience felt like. Mild interest crashing into way too much text and expecting me to start swimming.

Maybe if I had paid money I'd choose to stick with it a few hours, but I can tell that this is not gonna be what I enjoy.

Great game, the DLC is not worth the price though.

Mentioning paywalled content in the description is poor.

Although I appreciate the game for what it is, it's not for me.

The lack of QoL and obfuscation of very important stats is a major pain. If I end up missclicking multiple times in terms of where my movement went or what I struck, this isn't "cool and deep game design", this is messy.
Covid? Dunno what that does. The stats of my cats on the overworld after sustaining multiple injuries? You'd think you could click on the tabs depicting the cats and their healthbar yeah...no.

Characters constantly have a 'important bubble' showing up on the map; 2/3 times it happened, it was for incredibly unimportant information.

Sewer area? Yeah most enemies are just immune to fire, making it far less useful than expected.

There'd probably be a lot more confusing designs if I had kept playing, and it's just irritating me.

The irritating part is that its style is perfect. Excellent music, fun sound design and pretty and smooth animations. As a game though, I didn't feel much than indifference due to the irritations. Hell, the second run I had only won thanks to RNG giving my healer "revive on heal".

Unfortunately it's not my kind of game. I enjoy seeing youtubers play it, but I definitely don't want to try and control this rube goldberg machine.

EDIT: The number of crashes has totalled 31. Do NOT buy this game if you have an Intel graphics card.


Changing my review in realization;

The developers are lying since the 30th of January in their Early Access steam declaration.

What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“The game is fully playable, stable, and already highly enjoyable. While you may encounter occasional minor bugs, there shouldn’t be any major issues."

AMD and Intel GPUs are suffering from unplayable framerates and are generally forced to disable core graphical components since they're either outright broken or horribly tank their performance.
Nvidia GPUs also have major issues running the game even when on definitely capable hardware.
I myself have started to consistently suffer from hard crashes repeatedly just engaging in combat, and performance would horrifically tank at times maxxing out my GPU at 100%.

Many others are saying how performance even on the old map is massively degraded compared ot the Tech Demo.


The Early Access trailer depicts blood splatters on pillars and successfully bashing heads into the ground, but users have tested this with as advantageous of conditions as possible, but they can't seem to do it.
Additionally, 'missions' like "The pit" and "Narrow Passage" currently are not in the game in spite of being advertised as such.


We don't know. Theories are being thrown around, moderators don't know much either and the mission-statement by the developers is a standard "We have been made aware of performance issues and will look into fixing them".
I vaguely remember a claim made by either a moderator or even developer that this version would have far better performance.

Although I am capable of having fun with the game, I wholeheartedly DO NOT RECOMMEND buying into this, because this could just turn out to be a game-dump by the publishers/developers realizing that further development is not in the cards.

Civvie11 has lead me here. Excellent price for an amazing game.

A fun lil game. Not much else to say, honestly.

Haven't played much yet, though it feels both weirdly intricate but also restrictive with some clear limiting factors.

Banana Leaves? Nah you can't use those for shelter, are you insane?

You're a researcher who probably was partially trained to be a camper of sorts? Yeah just scarf down an entire bundle of unknown berries rather than slowly testing it.

\Gasp, they give you 4x food poisoning and now you're just passing out as you're trying to get back to your shelter because you vomited 3 times even though there wouldn't even BE anything left to vomit!

What do you mean? Animals don't have ANY fatty tissue at all, it's all PURE protein ofcourse!

Okay, you make a stone spear with a knife blade, makes sense. How do you make a knife with a handle then? With a blunt stone of course!

You accidentally throw something on the ground? 90% of the time it's just gone, not even the game knows!

Carrying one long stick? Nah you can't pick up the leaves and smaller sticks on the way.

Why does the camera keep snapping upright when 'harvesting' something? ♥♥♥♥'s jarring!


After that, I believe I'm sadly incompatible with the game. Some might say 'skill issue', to which I agree.

I've just now beaten the first boss (I spent a lot of time practicing parrying/dodging and exploring in the prologue), and I can say that I really enjoy the game.

For spec recommendations; 1070ti, ryzen 5600z, 16GB RAM.
That will get you medium quality with AMD FSR "quality" running smooth enough at 60FPS.

If you encounter strangely purple or pink clothing/textures, just reload the save.