If you are looking for Stardew-likes, I have been enjoying Coral Island. Full disclosure, I think it’s bullshit they they market it as version “1.1” when it is so very clearly not finished, but honestly after 400+ hours in Stardew I’ve been enjoying it despite its very present jank.
If Stardew is a 10/10 for me, I’d give Coral Island a 6.5/10 and mind you that’s on a real 0-10 scale, not the 5-10 scale usually used lol.
See Coral Island is so cute and unique that I personally felt it was just perfect. It wasn’t so closely resembling SDV that I felt like I was playing a bootleg version haha
Yes, I love its characters and some of the ways it diverged from Stardew. But it has a lot of undeniable jank and is objectively unfinished. Mind you that hasn’t stopped me from approaching 100 hours in it, but I would feel dishonest not mentioning it.
Impressions from watching someone play it: it looks like a clone of Stardew Valley. The music isn’t terrible but I wouldn’t say it’s good. Some mechanics from Stardew Valley that weren’t easy enough were changed, like fishing. I’m not sure that’s bad for everyone, it can just be a casual game to relax.
Fair point. I didn’t find it relaxing, it just felt like a gutted version of Stardew that treats me like I’m not smart enough to figure anything out. Everything has an unskivable tutorial like blacksmithing and cooking. You can’t buy any of your own basic recipes. It just sends them to you automatically in the mail, which is extremely annoying because it undermines player choice. That’s what was kinda annoying to me. Maybe if it was more like old-school RuneScape it would be more relaxing ? That game has no recipes, you just level up and know the recipe by default.
Not to belittle Stardew, a game I adore, but Stardew is itself very much cribbed, as a desperately needed spiritual successor to the Harvest Moon/Rune Factory games. I don’t intend on checking out fields of mistria so I’ll just take your word on the rest.
I don’t like the graphics. It looks very generic. It’s higher fidelity but looks worse than OSRS because at least osrs is somewhat stylized.
I don’t like that you have to click twice on everything.
I played the tutorial, and nothing hooked me in. It felt like your average mobile game.
Dialogue was painfully generic. “Go here to accomplish objective then come back for next objective”
It doesn’t have a unique identity or anything to grab my interest that makes me want to put up with the grind it demands from me, which it did immediately after the tutorial.
Your opinion is valid. I think some parts could be reworked. I see what you’re saying, but how you’re saying it is what is rubbing people the wrong way.
Honestly, I like these opinion posts, because even if I’m a fanboy, I might agree with certain things.
First of all this is a lot of text and I appreciate all the effort you have taken to express your opinion.
There are some points I would like to comment on even if I have not played the game myself. Firstly there is the Aspect of effort. While I can see how beeing on your own or exploring can be a rewarding experience, it creates the tense setting where the developer needs to assess exactly how much effort a player will put into the game. And personally I feels a game like this is mainly cozy and should not put up barriers in front of the player.
Secondly I don’t blame devs for not beeing active on social media with the community. Especially when your game is rather small this task can be really mentally exhausting and we all know how easily people get toxic on the Internet. Not everyone wants to put themselves out there, maybe they dislike the attention. They became a developer and not a social media manager after all.
First of all this is a lot of text and I appreciate all the effort you have taken to express your opinion.
Apologies, still new to the posting style here on Lemmy. It cut off the TLDR which I have added back in
There are some points I would like to comment on even if I have not played the game myself
I don’t get it. How can you provide your commentary on something you have never experienced? Like, I get what you’re saying and respect to your opinions but like… You kind of have to try it and live through it for a little while to really get it.
Secondly I don’t blame devs for not beeing active on social media with the community. Especially when your game is rather small
If you look at their actual team website, they have a huge team. I think there’s no excuse for them to have no community presence, considering that concerned ape is just one person, he’s just one dude developing the entire thing himself and he has been very vocal and very active. Their website shows that they have at least 10 members on their team, and they barely interact with the community. It just feels like a cash grab when you take that into account. Sorry if that sounds harsh but it is what it is
My comment about the lenght was not a critisism. I appreciate details about your opinion.
I wanted to comment under your post because some of your points don’t feel specific to the game and I think my opinion might offer you a different view. Also this is a social platform and I just like to interact with people who take the time to express their opinions.
I still disagree with you point about community managers. Just because Concerned Ape is a stellar developer who likes to interact with poeple doesn’t mean everyone need to do it his way. There are so many devs who got swarmed by toxicity, not wanting to potentially deal with that is perfectly valid.
Secondly I don’t blame devs for not beeing active on social media with the community. Especially when your game is rather small this task can be really mentally exhausting and we all know how easily people get toxic on the Internet.
I took fault with that as well.
I am a developer who makes games on the side. I mostly do gamejams and release games on itch.io. It’s a pretty positive community.
But I did get one comment (only one) that some troll told me to stick to my day job. Like I am? I do this to create art and fun, and make bank working a boring software job. I put all my passion into making this game in a short gamejam window.
I know some fans love reading about “the struggle”. They see the developer eating ramen and crunching 160 hours as passion. To me, that’s abuse. Because survivors bias, there are people with 100x the passion but their game doesn’t sell.
Everyone who puts out a game is doing it for different reasons. You have no idea if the dev team was crunching late hours while their child was dying from cancer. Or if they were coding this on their golden yacht using AI bots. To judge them because they don’t share that as not having passion?
It’s a toxic metric and would strongly recommend removing it.
I willing to bet the new console isn’t significantly better hardware (which was already outdated when the Switch released), but just made to have a system the didn’t already have emulators for it. The Switch emulators work perfectly (better than the console). The new one probably is focused specifically at preventing them from working and not being a better device for consumers.
Thanks for sharing such detailed notes; interesting and helpful.
As an inveterate Windows user (I support it at work), I’m not surprised by the challenges at all. I hadn’t heard of Bazzite though, I’ll have to check it out.
I have been very particular in this review about the experience of using Windows compared to Bazzite, not the performance. I’ve seen many reviews talk about how one is offere 5-10 FPS more than the other OS but you really don’t notice that most of the time.
Windows can do everything that Linux can do on average but the experience is vastly different. That is what I’m trying to say in this post.
But don't worry; well make you buy those legacy games in the shop again because fuck you pay me for the 4th time for a game from the 80s/90s. ~ abe Nintendo, probably
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