Recent reviews by Curious

Great game, but it's not a paid product. On Steam you are forced to pay for it because Atari hijacked the success of this free, open source version of the game. Go to the OpenTTD website and download it there, for free, forever. Again, this is a legally free and open source game. Do not pay money for it on Steam.

Very fun roguelike.

Don't play this if you aren't okay with borderline-porn in your games or have a strong aversion to gore, because the author has neither of those things.

I was expecting a pretty standard boomer shooter, but with a lot of horny stuff in it based on what I heard about this. People were right about the horny stuff, but the game is not a standard boomer shooter at all it's quite different and very, very fun imo. I wouldn't really call it a boomer shooter because it has added some pretty game-changing systems on top of the boomer shooter core. It feels so well designed for what it's supposed to be, I really felt like the levels, guns, enemies, and player options were all like a match made in heaven.
Something I particularly likes is that you can take the game slow and steady or you can go balls to the wall fast if you know what you are doing. Also how you can choose to wear varying types of armor that limit mobility in exchange for protection. It all felt very tactical and open to playstyle changes.

I absolutely was not expecting the story to be one of the reasons I couldn't put this game down, but the world and the protagonist just drew me in. I wanted to know what was going on and why and it was drip fed just right to keep things going.

Fun premise but there's a lot of small things that add up to make me find it grating to play. I also feel like I had seen the entire game by the time I played 2 hours, but I kept playing regardless to get a win. I ended up doing 10 runs, two of which I won and a final one on the way to winning in which the game crashed to desktop. The game feels pretty good when things are falling into place, but after the crash I couldn't help but feel that all the issues made me not want to open the game again. It feels cheap and unpolished in some ways, while in others (the art and music) the game is fantastic. There's an addictive element to it like many similar games, but there's so many small barriers getting in the way of you actually getting into it enough to get addicted.


1) You can't see your stats during a game. You can't see your total damage bonuses, attack speed, or any other stats at all. The whole game is based on building yourself up via small bonuses and snowballing to victory. It feels really lame to not be able to see what my total bonuses are during a run. Every other similar game lets you do this and it feels good.

2) I normally NEVER complain about a lack of guidance in games, but after 5 hours and 9 runs I still can't tell you how the game decides which cards in my 13 card deck are going to be replaced or if there's a limit on each rarity. I couldn't tell you how combining cards into higher tiers exactly works because sometimes it's impossible for me to get certain cards and other times they are extremely easy to get. Feels like there's some kind of weighting system or restrictions on card rolling that I can't decipher. Game systems crucial to success feel hidden away from the player.

3) The above issues make it very hard to plan anything, which is crucial in this game because it isn't large mistakes that end your run it's a long list of small mistakes adding up to a loss. Multiple times a run that was going well suddenly stopped dead in it's tracks because something changed and suddenly I'm not able to acquire or seemingly even reroll into certain cards key to my strategy.

4) A successful run on the double speed mode takes over a full hour. This is kind of long, but it wouldn't be an issue if it was all gameplay. The problem is that you spend 10 minutes of your 70 minute win actually playing the game, the other 60 are spent watching your towers shoot because the double speed mode is still slow. Double speed feels like it should be the default pace of the game, I can't imagine spending two hours on a run in regular speed. This feels insane to me to be honest.

5) The options screen is a joke. No borderless windowed mode. No mouse sensitivity options and it defaults to a slow mouse with bad acceleration turned on. The sound settings are left/right arrows that are extremely hard to control and seem to just go up or down small random amounts when you click the buttons. It feels like it was added at the last minute so they could check off "options screen" on the list of things PC games need.

6) The game has some very weird input quirks and issues. I'll give 3 examples.
If you use the mouse wheel to zoom in or out you need to do it slowly because if you do it too fast the game won't recognize ~90% of your inputs and it might even zoom you back and forth a few times. You have to scroll wheel slowly for it to work.
There's a box where you can draw pixel art, but if you move your mouse faster than a snail's pace it won't draw a line it will skip pixels. It's like the game only accepts inputs a few times per second.
There's a minigame inside this one where you are a Pong paddle and have to hit a ball into bricks to break them and then it bounces back. It WOULD be fun if your mouse wasn't rendered on-screen while being totally misaligned to the paddle. Oh and the pong paddle moves slower than the mouse so when you will see your mouse flying left and right across the game, pissing you off. This should have been a fun minigame, but instead it's infuriating.

7) The unlocks are pretty lame outside of new characters, and even those aren't THAT different. New cards don't feel exciting to unlock and many are totally useless for particular playstyles so you're only ruining your later games by unlocking cards that are going to hinder you and be in your way. It feels super counter-intuitive that unlocking stuff is 50% good stuff and 50% total crap.

I keep looking back at this game hoping it was made better or that mods have come out to fix the issues, but sadly not.

It would be fun if you didn't spend 80% of your time doing chores and travelling to the fun parts of the game. Combat and exploration is fun, base building is pretty cool, but the days last way too short and you lose your most important exploring stats (stamina, health, armor) way too fast. You'll spend most of your time preparing to travel and then travelling, not actually doing the fun parts. Also don't even think about staying up late or taking extra time in the fun parts because the night time waaaaay more dangerous, your armor is broken in 2 hits, you have no stamina anymore from all that running you did, and if you don't go to bed early enough you'll miss out on one of the most powerful buffs in the game: the waking up at sunrise buff!

In Valheim when you go to bed, no matter the time, you wake up at Dawn. In this game, if you go to bed late you just sleep in, missing out of your already extremely short daylight but also miss out on that awesome morning buff. There's also the way armor works. It's just a 2nd healthbar that you can't replenish out in the field and dies in 1-3 hits no matter how far you are into the game because the game scales with you linearly. Once your armor HP bar is used it's purely cosmetic. Totally stupid system.

For every 22 minute day you play this game there's like 5 or 6 minutes of actual fun stuff. The rest is all chores to prep for the 5 minutes and travelling to and from those 5 minutes. I've never felt like the timescale and chores:fun ratio are so ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in a survival craft game like I have in this game. Basically every other similar game does these two key mechanics so much better. This is a waste of an amazing LOTR game because the presentation is absolutely amazing despite so many core mechanics being either imbalanced or entirely messed up in design.

There's no mods that fix these core issues currently and the modding scene is practically dead so it won't be fixed any time soon. The devs have no interest in adding settings to allow you to customize how some aspects work either.

I looked forward to this game for ages, looked like everything I want in a game of this genre which I love. Sadly that ended up not being the case. I don't recommend this despite completing it in full because I completed it out of spite only to fall deeper into my sunk cost fallacy mindset every time I got a new ending. Sadly by the time I got every ending I had gone from feeling a bit disappointed to outright disliking this game and removing the dev's other game from my wishlist.

This game peaks half way in when you realize you already solved the combat and they aren't going to introduce anything more exciting or game-changing. You might be like me and soldier on anyway to get answers about what's going on and learn more about the world/story. Unfortunately both of those things peaked even earlier than the gameplay. Spoiler free talk about the endings here. The endings all left me with nothing but disappointment and feeling really cringe. All of them come off as the dev huffing his own farts after reading wikipedia articles on philosophy. There is no proper explanation for the world. There is no story to be told. You learn 95% of what there is to learn in the first couple hours and the other 5% on the first ending. What you thought in the first hour was a deep lake turns out to be a puddle to splash in once and move on from.

This game feels like it's always on the tip of my tongue when I am trying to get a full taste. It's teasing me with something more, but never actually delivers on it. It reads the back of the book to me, then puts the book back on the shelf. It shows me the trailer, but never shows me the movie.

I LOVED this game in the first hours and it hooked it's claws in me, but 16 hours later I was so disappointed by it that I spent the next 5 hours of my life trying to find anything to redeem it. The combat is average, gets stale way too fast. Enemy design is average, again also very stale mere hours in. The world is neat to look at and mostly fun to explore. The world and story telling are a total wash, the worst parts by far.

Edit: Wanted to add that the dev and I spoke on reddit a bit and he is well aware of what I wrote and is actively changing things and making the game feel better for the full release. Really cool to hear!

I really want to like this game because the graphics are charming and the premise is very cool. That said, I can't because the charm wears off VERY quickly when you realize how poorly thought out the gameplay is. I've chalked some of it up to bugs because I find it hard to believe a developer would intentionally make some aspects of the game feel useless, but there are issues nonetheless.

The main gameplay loop consists of buying a comet, setting up your base of operations, then mantaining it until you decide to sell your comet and move onto a bigger one that has more space, more resources, and more opportunity. You do this over and over to afford bigger and bigger comets. It is very fast paced if you want it to be, I went through 4 comets in around 45 mins. It's easy to pick up and understand. That said, there are some glaring issues as of the demo's current state. I can see this game being super fun, but not right now. I'll say why below.

1) You need to constantly micro manage everything all the time to the point of tedium. You burn through resources quickly and every single building needs 1-4 resources, each of which you can only move 1 at a time. You will be clicking back and forth between buildings for 90% of your gameplay. This issue should be solved by building hubs and hiring workers to help automate this process, but that leads me to my next issue.

2) The workers are HORRIBLE at their job!!! I cannot understate how utterly useless these workers feel. I even did a test run to see if my issue was not hiring enough, but even when you have more workers than actual jobs to get done they still can't do the jobs sufficiently. They let your core production buildings run dry while other buildings that rely on them are being filled way beyond need. Over half my workforce consistently walks between buildings holding nothing at all! It feels like these things exist solely to force you to expand your production chain into the things that keep them alive, but then they wont even deliver Oxygen into their own hub to keep themselves alive!!! This flaw alone ruins the entire game for me.

3) While it's cute that you walk around as a physical robot and can manually mine resources, move them around, etc, it serves no real purpose and doesn't add anything to the gameplay, sometimes even getting in the way of it. You can pick up and drop off resources between buildings with just button clicks, so the only actual gameplay purpose of having the little drone as yourself is to let you mine things manually, which becomes obsolete very quickly. I didn't like getting lost behind buildings and feel like the minor survival aspect behind your needs was unnecessary. With how bad the AI was, I only felt dread while making my food/water/oxygen supply chains on my last 2 comets.

Personally I think #1 could be solved super easily by allowing the player to move more than 1 unit of 1 item at a time. Adding hotkeys would go a long way too in making the process of moving items smoother too. For #2 I can only say I feel like the AI has to be bugged or something with how much time they wasted moving around with no goods. I would love a priority system or more control over which resources they bring where, because right now they are really stupid in where they bring things. For #3, I wouldn't mind at all if the tiny robot aspect was ditched entirely and it played more like a traditional tycoon where you are an invisible entity just controlling things. If you want to stick with the robot motif though consider making the player a flying robot that doesn't get caught on terrain and buildings. I don't really see any purpose in letting the player pick up objects in their hands either, it is basically useless seeing as you can pick up/put down in between buildings from any range.

A final minor issue: It would be great if the UI of buildings was clamped to being inside the viewing area. It's annoying to click on a store at the top of your screen then needing to physically move up or zoom out just to see the whole UI. The same for other building UIs near the edge of the screen. Clicking something on the very right edge of my screen should have the building UI appear in full at that edge, not 80% off my screen on top of the building I clicked on.

P.S. does mining scrap do anything? Sometimes I think it dropped resources but most of the time I think it did nothing I could see.

Kickstarted this after playing the demo. It's really fun still!

Really good game

A very personal walking game you play for the story. I enjoyed it a lot.