Recent reviews by Jorick

I usually love these sorts of games, but Dinkum had a bunch of small annoyances that built up into an unenjoyable experience that made me tap out and uninstall. A few of the smaller gripes I had include the NPCs being extremely basic and uninteresting, ores being a pain to find and not respawning very quickly, tracking the requirements for new building materials does not actually track how many you've added to the building already, no marker on bug/fish tooltips showing if you've given it to the museum or not (referencing the collection menus to see this instead is a pain), and fish and bugs not stacking in your inventory (made extra painful since they also can't be stored in boxes either). There were two bigger things that pushed me to quit as well.

First, almost everything to do with buying and selling items was pretty annoying. The shopkeeper guy having to yap at you for a couple lines before giving you the yes/no option to buy every time you wanted to buy anything was needless and tedious. Not being able to see what something actually sells for without first trying to sell one individually is weird and irritating. Lacking a way to sell any items outside of the shopkeeper guy's business hours (like a Stardew Valley style box to leave stuff in) was a massive pain. On the plus side, being able to mass sell a bunch of stuff at once by selecting everything you want to sell was nice.

Second, and the one that made me decide to quit playing, was the tools and tool upgrade system. You can only buy the basic tools from the main shop guy, and only one per day (except Sunday because he's just fully closed so if you broke your last pick and really need more tin, too bad, sucks to suck). The durability runs out really quick on the picks and axes, so it's very easy to buy one and burn through it in less than a day. When durability runs out, the tool just breaks and disappears. Unlocking the next tier of tools does not make this better: the higher level tools require one of the basic tools to craft (so no getting around the store by making your own tools), they also break and disappear. There is not, as one might expect, a way to repair your tools using basic materials. Repairing is instead locked behind a different NPC and is prohibitively expensive in the early game. I've read that it becomes a trivial cost when you're much further along, but I'm not willing to play for another 20+ hours to reach the point of a basic game system becoming tolerable.

is rly gud