Recent reviews by Devonin

Very short, but cute enough to be worth a couple bucks when you want something to kill a couple hours.

Definitely signalled there'd be more to it and then there wasn't, but what do you want for 2 bucks?

Fishpond produces great games for free with virtually nothing feature locked behind the DLC (So far for this game there are going to be different cities available to supporter pack purchasers though even then, one DLC map at a time will be available to everybody. Everything else is cosmetic), and the supporter packs basically just pay for server costs. 5 Bucks is a very small ask to help a one-person dev team keep it afloat.

A decent to good story elevated by very good voice work. One of the few games like this with a teen protagonist that actually reads like a teenager. Probably helped by taking place during a time when I was a teenager, so i actually know whether people sounded like that.

A very Jamrock Shuffle sort of game, you could probably "speed through" the whole narrative in maybe an hour most of which would be voice clips, but it was worth poking around and seeing what dialogue could fall out, didn't have a bunch of annoying repetition, and it feels like only one single instance of "This dialogue feels like it's not aware of the dialogue we already had"

Not a deeply emotional game in the way that a Gone Home or a Tell Me Why is, but the characters felt real, their motivations consistent, conflict when it was warranted, and quality voice work.

Definitely worth a play for people who like narrative games.

I keep flip-flopping on whether to check off the 'yes' or 'no' for whether I recommend this game. i wish there was an "Eh?" middle option.

This game is very short, with very little going on. Almost everything is clickable, and will give you some kind of dialogue, mostly to tell you that there's nothing useful about the thing you clicked on. Except...maybe later there will be but there's nothing to indicate this. Every time I clicked on the fridge we talked about how we had no intention of ever looking in the fridge. Be really unfortunate if something later on would require you to look in the fridge...oh wait.

It's less of a hidden object game and more of a 'Any time you need to find something new, you have to click on every object until you find the right one, which was very likely -not- indicated by the previous times you clicked on it' game. Also lots of weird flag-setting issues, where, long after you know lots about the people who lived in the house, you're still getting the dialogue you got at the very start when everything was a mystery.

That said, what story is there is an interesting story. It has worthwhile things to say, and says them well. The relationship between Avi and Bianca was well done, but the whiplash nature of the flag setting problems made it hard to feel it. A major emotional moment would happen between them as a story beat, and then you'd click on an object that prompted goofy joke dialogue. I know it's a limit of the format, but when the whole game is only 2 hours long, every time this happened, there wasn't enough meat to make up for it before you clicked on 50 things for the 50th time and got all the jokes.

The nature of the story gets incredibly serious incredibly fast, and then takes a pretty dark turn, but you've still got the chill lo-fi music playing even in the middle of a horrifying crisis. Two or three more tracks in the soundtrack so you could actually communicate the tone that goes along with "You're investigating a mysterious death" would have added a lot to the game.

I never re-play narrative games to "see all the outcomes". I prefer there to be one canonical playthrough that is 'the way this happened' so there was no chance I was going to run through this again to 100% it, but given that, as part of getting every achievement you have to literally fail to talk your 10 year old child down from killing herself I am -very- not ever playing through it again. I can't even imagine how the game could have even a dissatisfying end after that happens, given that the 'good ending' ends like....30 seconds after that same point, but boy do I not want to try and find out.

Ironically, there -are- good bones to this game, just...it's not enough. Buy it on a 50%+ sale, or if you're just desperate for any narrative game with even a nod towards any kind of diversity, but otherwise I think you're in for disappointment.

Says on the label "narrative adventure" that doesn't mean "adventure". Just because you're a detective doesn't mean this is a detective game. People give it negative reviews for not being 'what they thought' or for 'starting strong' but then 'getting worse' and honestly, those reviews are a meta-narrative for what this game is. This is a story about a detective taking cases like Prey is a game about going to work and doing some tests. This is a game about solving mysteries like Gone Home is a game about visiting your family.

If you can get rid of the preconceptions that you think are promised on the tin, and just experience this game, you'll find an incredible and philosophical treatise on identity, expectations, and just how high the limits are for the quality of a soundtrack.

It looks like an idle game but mostly really isn't. You can add some insect friends who help you deliver items to your capybaras, but it looks like they only do it if, at the moment the capybara wants a thing, you have one ready and also an idle insect to deliver it, otherwise they just...won't...so you have to do a bunch of the things manually anyway.

It's cute, it doesn't take long to 100%, has nice music, and everybody loves capybaras, who are friend to all.

UPDATED

(Original Review)
This is a fun little game to relax to while you're watching Netflix. It's easy, it's simple, and you'll get around 10-12 good hours of progress out of it before you reach the point where there's nothing left to do.

Worth picking up on any kind of sale now, and possibly with the hope for future implementations or DLC to give you a few more good hours out of it.
(/End Original Review)

So I came back and saw that there had, indeed, been a bunch of updates adding more content to the base game. Started a new game from scratch since there'd been so many re-balances in addition to the new content.

Basic view remains unchanged. A great game to have on while you're doing something else, since you only need to tend to it once or twice per game day. The extra stuff makes it a lot more interesting, but not really any more difficult. I could try moving up from "Normal" difficulty I guess, but eh.

The guard/thief mechanic basically does nothing. It's trivially easy to get your guard up to where he guards 100% against all levels of thief, though I even only saw a single instance of a medium thief in the entire play through to "winning" (By which I mean, 100%'ing all achievements) and zero of the hard thief.

Fires, sort of the same. Just a tax on gold paying for the good oil, and occasionally replacing an item that caught fire. The only time the fire ever spread beyond the one object that caught fire was because the staff tasked with putting it out walked up to the buckets and got caught on some geometry or something, and all that happened was one or two other things caught fire, and had to be replaced.

The outdoor garden is fine for if you want to do decorations, or want to put your games outdoors, but could have been another floor and been basically the same (except better because you could staff the floor directly instead of it adding onto what your 1st floor staff have to cover)

Altogether, it makes the basic play experience better because there's more to do, but didn't really transform it into anything it's not, which is fine!

Nothing I can tell you about this game will do it proper justice. Without spoilers, it sounds like an annoying task simulator. With spoilers, it's spoiled. You know how explaining to somebody what Katamari Damacy is, they look at you like you've described the worst sounding game in the world, and then after they've played Katamari Damacy for 10 minutes they're just in love with it? That's what Unpacking is like.

I see a lot of negative reviews talking about how the playtime wasn't worth the price, and I mean...I guess if you came into it expecting a game about unpacking houses, and went "This is a game where the thing that happened was I unpacked houses" then sure, I can understand feeling like it was pricey for the duration of the content.

But if all you got out of this was "I unpacked some houses" then you've fundamentally missed the point of this game. Obviously not going to spell it out here, but this game made me feel feelings, and I cried at the end, so like...if you "finished" and think there were no underlying messages or content to discern by the actual processes you were doing, I'm really sorry that you've missed a uniquely wonderful creation here.

I've described this game several times as "Factorio, without having to deal with conveyors, and an actual point to play the game more than once." So if you imagine a game like Factorio, abstracted one step further back, with a prestige mechanic where you can "cash-in" your city for a currency you spend on permanent production upgrades, that also includes an in-game chat, and a player-to-player resource trade economy, that's what this is.

Still early access, but not the kind where it's just an open beta in name only, FishPond is patching and updating, adding whole new mechanics and functionality several times a week. He's super active in his discord, takes suggestions for content and mechanics, and you can post a bug before you go to bed, and he's found it, fixed it and pushed an update by morning.

This 511 hours is in...about 528 actual calendar hours. It's been up and running basically nonstop.

The only idle game so far that has actually kept my interest long term. It probably has to do with how many of them involve picking different classes and things for individual runs, and therefore your numbers getting so big that the older classes don't progress you even if you like them better. None of that here, just a gradual addition of more and more core mechanics to continue moving you upwards. Writing definitely falls on the 'silly' side of things, but there so much content, and it's still in active development with new things being added fairly frequently, that there's really no end to it. 8600 hours logged, and I'm probably 2/3rds through the general progression.