Another game that I didn’t expect much from … and was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong.

The first time I saw the Book and Coppertop NPCs, I audibly groaned… I usually dislike “permanent companions” that just won’t shut the heck up, and this game has TWO of them, just great. But I quickly learned to like them for their witty dialogue and constant barter.

I haven’t actually finished the game yet so I can not vouch for the second half being as nice as the first, but what I’ve played so far had me wishing the in-game days were longer because I want to do All The Things™ everyday everywhere. Luckily there’s no rush, no timer, no penalty for taking your time, so you can just continue where you left off the next day, but I’ve had my fair share of “nooo I don’t wanna go home yet!”-moments nonetheless.

The main gameplay is a mix of garden simulator, town builder and exploration/adventure game with some fetch quests and puzzles sprinkled in. You can spend all your time pulling weeds and planting trees and fishing / catching bugs in the various worlds you create, or you can spend all your time creating and growing your settlements (plural!), building houses and shops and other facilities, customizing those, populating the area by deciding which visitors should stay, or you can spend all your time exploring the overworld, finding temples, caves, treasures, hidden NPCs while advancing the storyline (finding “song fragments” to restore the Evertree). There’s no penalty for neglecting either one - your plants can’t wither, NPCs don’t need a 24/7 babysitter, facilities don’t decay, and the story isn’t going anywhere unless you advance it yourself.

All in all a very charming, easygoing but still engaging game.

PRO:

  • Relaxed gameplay: no enemies, no “game over”. Even if you drown, you’ll just get put back on land after a quick fade-out

  • The world opens up gradually, making it possible to learn gameplay mechanics at a comfy pace. It never gets overwhelming

  • The NPCs have some delightfully snarky dialogue, make frequent use of puns and tongue-in-cheek references, but it never felt out of place or annoying to me

  • ALL THE ACHIEVEMENTS! You always have something to do, but you’re also not penalized for not doing anything

  • Treasure chests, caves, certain little creatures playing hide-and-seek, alchemist’s desks and full-fledged temples encourage and reward exploration

  • The temples and caves I’ve found so far all had different, unique puzzles that were self-explanatory and engaging

  • You can build your own settlements that grow over time, and decide which NPCs move in and what jobs they get

  • You can create an agender character, complete with the singular “they” in every dialogue. It was a surprise to see that option in a 5+ year old game when even the most recent AAA titles tend to struggle with the concept

  • There are even a bunch of romance options (NOT tied to specific gender) that stay kid-friendly throughout the playthrough (no kissing etc.)

  • The “worlds” you can create can have noticably different biomes: from standard-looking forests, plains and deserts to neon pink landscapes with tree-sized glowing mushrooms populated by caterpillar-dogs. I even had a world once where the ground had eyeballs that blinked and watched what you did, and one with a little gnome in a hut that scolded me after accidentally tripping over his tiny furniture.

  • You can tame most of the animals. Ever wanted to have a farm full of buffalo-sized green hamsters or a pet dragon-cat-poolnoodle-mix? Here you go.

  • Personal little pet peeve of mine: you can invert X- and Y-axis of the camera controls separately and even chose how close the camera is to your character (it’s a slider, not just 2 settings). I would love if other games followed that example because I legit can’t stand games with un-inverted or even mixed camera controls.

CON:

  • it occasionally lags, but I’m playing on a first gen Nintendo Switch and that thing has the processing power of a moist tortilla chip, so it might not be the game’s fault.
  • fish and insects are basically all the same. I stopped paying attention to them pretty quickly
  • The explorable world gets HUGE eventually but you do not have a map, minimap or compass. Expect to get lost often until you memorize the layout of the land. Luckily you can always fast travel to your destination if you get lost, but not getting lost in the first place would have been preferrable.
  • Even tho there are multiple different humanoid races that can populate your settlements, character creation is limited to only one species: Human. Not that big of a deal, but it would have been nice to play as something else
  • You can rename you worlds anytime, but the descriptions of items you got from them are stuck. If you have 7+ worlds that you renamed a bunch of times and then want to find out what specific world a caterpillar or flower came from when the description only states the old name, it’s a little inconvenient

Honestly the missing map is my only real complaint here. Everything else is just nitpicking and can probably be modded out if you’re playing on a PC.