First time playing, played for about an hour.
Visuals: Grass, plants, water look great. Textures and looking into the distance not so much. Some textures don't feel cohesive with the rest of the visual style, so they look extra grimey compared to the soft cellshading. The distant geometry and ocean looks bad, even on max settings. It's a shame because the world feels so much smaller and unimmersive when you look at the horizon and see some weirdness in the ocean or you can clearly see the low resolution impostering of the trees on the hill. The character models look pretty good, though the occasional NPC model looked a bit off. Also personally the mega milk shirt is a step too far, too memey and felt out of place. Lastly the city feel like a ghost town, needs more generic NPCs living their life or some such.
Audio: Music seems good. SFX was fine, except for the one on selecting a new game. That one is so recognizable it's ridiculous.
UI: The content and layouts of the menus seem fine, though the space it can take up feels unnecessary. Could probably make some of them smaller so there's less dead space. I also couldn't see any options to change the clock to 12 hour mode or the measurements to Fahrenheit/Imperial, which is OK but it's nice to have for those who prefer it a certain way.
Intro/Tutorial: Couldn't tell who was who, maybe add some icon over the head of a character to know who's talking? Being left alone by myself in my room without direction was weird, I was expecting one of the women to show me around town and or bring me to some land to start farming. The startup tutorial objectives are very small, may want to make it bigger so someone doesn't miss it. I decided to mess around with the fishing and bug catching first, caught enough for the objectives. When I got the filet fish objective I floundered around and couldn't figure how to do it.
I then renovated some grass in the city into a plot of land. I planted the plants and watered them manually. I didn't think I could craft sprinklers right there so I started wandering for a bit. Talking to NPCs I was disappointed by the lack of interaction beyond one sentence. I eventually found the sprinkler crafting option and made those, as well as a butcher table to filet. However when I tried to use the filet option all of them were red or grayed out so I guess I can't do what the tutorial asked of me? I slept for a awhile and harvested my crops once they went into the vegetative state. I then wandered and looked around before stopping.
Thoughts: Game seems to have a lot of complex gameplay mechanics, like the realistic farming stats and the freeform looking cooking/nutrition system(from what I saw of the 'quick guides' from the pause menu). However it's too open in the beginning to have a sense of what to do and makes it harder to commit all this new information to memory. Could really use a more usual tutorial at the start, focusing on just one part at a time. From what I played it failed to hook me, I was pretty bored and only just starting to understand the prominent farming loop after an hour.
Game looks like it could be fun if I gave a few more hours, but the intro really does an injustice to it. That's assuming the complex mechanics don't become a headache to deal with later. Anyways, hope to see you improve this game in the future.
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