The most disappointing party for me is that I've played more immersive city management games that WEREN'T in first person. This game does just enough of everything to feel feature-complete but it lacks so much magic. I don't feel connected to my villagers, I don't feel connected to my village, and I don't feel connected to the world.

The NPCs have zero dynamism, merely expressing their needs through dialogie and UI until they drop below an arbitrary threshold and simply walk away. Not even a hint of uncooperativeness until they leave. They don't actually hunt, they don't actually chop down trees, the former is merely an ambient animation and the latter isn't even depicted. It's trying to be a boots-on-the-ground village builder but I'm not wearing the same boots as the characters I'm walking with? The player character is an all-powerful being compared to the one-track minds of the games inhabitants. I can chop down trees, I can hunt, but not them. It just makes me feel like I'm playing Minecraft.

The village building process is fine. It's not really pushing the envelope when it comes to the actual method you construct your base but the customisation is so off in so many ways. There's a beautiful array of decorations to use but they don't contribute to villager happiness or anything that would incentivise making your village actually nice to look at instead of perfectly gridded buildings with no aesthetic value. The buildings are always the same shape and size, so all you can decide is which walls will be windows and where you would like your singular door per building to go. Any paths you draw along the terrain will have no affect on the shape or form of the terrain. You're just painting a texture over it. There are no options to smooth out or raise up terrain to depict interesting or realistic village formations, so if your main road happens to go over the bumpiest part of the map well that's just how your village looks now.

The world just feels empty. Thankfully not lifeless as there are plenty of animal species littering the landscape and they are dynamic enough that they make for interesting hunts and dangerous threats. the game is also quite gorgeous at times with certain views or the way the light will break through a maple tree. If you aren't in one of the world's villages or your own, you're in the wild which feels the same everywhere in every part of the map. The appearance of bandits is nice and I got a good spook from them because for once I wasn't the only human in-game with their own initiative. But alas, it's one of the few games I felt like I had to resort to fast travel because I couldn't suffer the tedium of feeling zero adventure leaving the safety of village walls.

I believe this game could become something worth more of my time in the future. The devs are clearly hard workers and passionate, but it just doesn't feel like this game is doing any one thing well enough that I wouldn't have more fun engaging with in similar titles. I would leave a positive review out of good-faith but I don't feel the 90% positive review score the game currently has accurately reflects the consistent quality of the game.

The most disappointing party for me is that I've played more immersive city management games that WEREN'T in first person. This game does just enough of everything to feel feature-complete but it lacks so much magic. I don't feel connected to my villagers, I don't feel connected to my village, and I don't feel connected to the world. [b]The NPCs[/b] have zero dynamism, merely expressing their needs through dialogie and UI until they drop below an arbitrary threshold and simply walk away. Not even a hint of uncooperativeness until they leave. They don't actually hunt, they don't actually chop down trees, the former is merely an ambient animation and the latter isn't even depicted. It's trying to be a boots-on-the-ground village builder but I'm not wearing the same boots as the characters I'm walking with? The player character is an all-powerful being compared to the one-track minds of the games inhabitants. I can chop down trees, I can hunt, but not them. It just makes me feel like I'm playing Minecraft. [b]The village[/b] building process is fine. It's not really pushing the envelope when it comes to the actual method you construct your base but the customisation is so off in so many ways. There's a beautiful array of decorations to use but they don't contribute to villager happiness or anything that would incentivise making your village actually nice to look at instead of perfectly gridded buildings with no aesthetic value. The buildings are always the same shape and size, so all you can decide is which walls will be windows and where you would like your singular door per building to go. Any paths you draw along the terrain will have no affect on the shape or form of the terrain. You're just painting a texture over it. There are no options to smooth out or raise up terrain to depict interesting or realistic village formations, so if your main road happens to go over the bumpiest part of the map well that's just how your village looks now. [b]The world[b] just feels empty. Thankfully not lifeless as there are plenty of animal species littering the landscape and they are dynamic enough that they make for interesting hunts and dangerous threats. the game is also quite gorgeous at times with certain views or the way the light will break through a maple tree. If you aren't in one of the world's villages or your own, you're in the wild which feels the same everywhere in every part of the map. The appearance of bandits is nice and I got a good spook from them because for once I wasn't the only human in-game with their own initiative. But alas, it's one of the few games I felt like I had to resort to fast travel because I couldn't suffer the tedium of feeling zero adventure leaving the safety of village walls. I believe this game could become something worth more of my time in the future. The devs are clearly hard workers and passionate, but it just doesn't feel like this game is doing any one thing well enough that I wouldn't have more fun engaging with in similar titles. I would leave a positive review out of good-faith but I don't feel the 90% positive review score the game currently has accurately reflects the consistent quality of the game.