Recent reviews by idiotized

This game is already so perfectly delightful, but it keeps getting better and better. It's well balanced, but offers many tweaks for XP and season length, so you can really tailor the game to your liking.

For me, the setting is idyllic. There are layers of challenges that span from survival to fighting bandits, and progression feels satisfying as you gain villagers and balance the management of your settlement. You can spend your day hunting or farming, you can focus on earning a profit or decorating. Decorating is amazing, in my opinion, because you truly have to earn and learn all the schematics for larger elements. Clutter and smaller decorations are literally just every item that exists in the game, and you drop them on the ground and drag them around. No weird grid-like snapping. This can be frustrating, but in the end, once you perfect the controls, you can make an amazingly authentic, natural, lived-in settlement. It satisfies my inner artist.

I love taking care of the animals, exploring the land, happening upon bandit camps (which shift and change at random through the seasons), mushroom hunting, deer hunting, quests... my partner and I can spend the entire weekend building our village together! It's a great game with a ton of progression.

Super cozy game, beautiful, with a fairly sweet meets sad story and lots of opportunities to work with friends to gain materials easily. Home decorating is lovely, and now there's animal breeding, which is delightful! If you like gratifying zone-out farming, decorating, collecting or or achievement hunting, you'll probably like this game.

Is it the most engaging? Is the story the most riveting? No. But that's not what it's trying to be.

Just getting started, and there's already so many cool things to discover. I'm a big fan of APICO, and it plays a lot like that, but with what feels like more depth and complexity. The writing is so funny, there's a story and the world feels mysterious and alive. That said, it's also a sandbox! It lends itself to that cozy 'zone out' feel with a great 'just one more thing' feedback loop, yet seems easy to leave and come back to as well because of how robust the encyclopedia and journals are in game. There's something for every kind of gamer - adventurers who like to discover things, peeps who like to experiment, completionists who love to achievement farm. Best of all, the artwork is fire! I love it so far.

Immersive story, rich and beautiful worldbuilding, challenging tactical decisions and combat, and a game design that accommodates a diverse number of play styles, this game ticks all the boxes. The story is not another rehashing of the tired "heroes journey" and doesn't pander to the typical "become great and all powerful!" story line that plagues so many RPGs. Instead, the journey of self-discovery has less to do with your character, and more to do with how they fit into the mythological landscape of the story. As a woman gamer, I find this approach to a story much more friendly to diverse player backgrounds. A player, no matter who they are, will find lots of things to care about in this game, and many opportunities to explore a wide array of character orientations and value systems. Also, it's super beautiful.

This is a phenomenal game for anyone who considers themselves a visual thinker, creative, or enjoys gardening and building. It's purely about aesthetics, and the gameplay mechanics are simple, but allow you to be strategic in the way you coax your plants to grow.

I'm an avid gardener in real life, and while there are a lot of fantasy elements in this game (placing trash next to a plant will do the opposite of make it grow), it still feels like *actual* gardening. Plants respond to pruning and watering. They grow better in certain places. You can set off chain reactions of growth. You can grow things in weird places, and before you know it, you have a gorgeous post-apocalyptic flower garden or bizarre surrealist landscapes.

It's relaxing, fun to experiment with, and still quite challenging. I hope the developer keeps working on this. There are no other garden sims in existence -- there are farm games which are more economy sims than gardening sims, and there are a few landscape design sims that are part of other games, but even those fail to capture the realistic, wild growth of real plants.

Somehow, despite the unrealistic setting, Cloud Gardens has managed to create the most realistic gardening sim in existence. Plants really grow, they entangle each other and things. They fail to thrive in certain conditions, they invade and take over in others. They branch and shift and adapt to obstacles and damage, allowing the gardener to actually prune and nurture plants into beautifully curated, but still awesomely wild looking gardens. It's just fantastic.

I hope that more plants and objects are added. If you're a plant person, a base building person, an artist, a decorator, interested in landscapes and environments, then this game is for you!

This game gives me nearly everything I could want in a game:
- Gardening with actually beautiful plants
- City planning/management
- Dress-up
- Cute animal taming
- Discovery
- Collecting
- Puzzles
- Relationship management
- Decorating

It's pretty easy - but there always seems to be something to do, so the easiness feels relaxing and not boring. The way the worlds grow, and the ability to have multiple growing worlds at the same time, allow you to create your own challenges and goals. It's addictive and really pleasant!

Night City is immersive and imaginative, it's a technicolor dystopian dream. The NPCs are well written and voiced, and you feel like your character from day one. There are a few small things that can interrupt the roleplay cohesion, like how your personality kind of becomes very street-kidesque despite whatever lifestyle you stated with. V doesn't stay chill and classy - and maybe that's due to other story elements. It's nothing major, but limits the variety that you can believably bring to your character's concept as you play (if you're not a big roleplayer, you probs won't even notice what I am talking about).

Factions, friendships, and romance need a huge rework and DLC, in my opinion, as many of them are brief and a bit pointless to both the story and your character's actual advancement. Jackie and Johnny feel the most real, and I think the other NPCs you interact with need that kind of depth and more opportunities to interact with them meaningfully.

The gameplay is great - I don't play on ultra-difficult, so I can't speak to that -- but I find there's plenty of variety in terms of how combat works and a good balance between player skill and game mechanics. It's nice - you can play for the long haul and see your hard work pay off over time through char development and story progression, but it's also a great game for playing briefly after work, as you can zone out and do side quests without feeling like you need to commit to hours of play for a little payoff.

I think it's great, and I can't wait to see how it evolves with added content, DLC, and patches.

RE:BUGS - If you have the hardware to run this game, it runs smoothly and the bugs are pretty minor and mostly cosmetic. A quick save/reload fixes most glitches quickly, and they don't happen that often compared to other games, like FO4's nearly unplayable downtown Boston. No crashes or anything like that for me.

Euro Truck Simulator? That sounds like a really stupid game. It's not a stupid game. It's an awesome game. It's simultaneously relaxing and challenging. There are so many "simulation" games out there that really stink - they're too controlled or unreaistic. The physics in this game are great -- when you're pulling a heavy load, it's difficult. When the rain starts falling, it's terrifying. The scenerey is awesome, and it's really fun driving all around the country. This game, even though the format is totally different, reminds me of my favorite sim classics like Railroad Tycoon and Roller Coaster Tycoon. Pro tip: buy this game and all its DLC, and then play with your gamepad or wheel, and find your favorite streaming radio station from Europe. Play this!