I really want to give it 4.5, but the charm loses out to the lack of polish.
When I say lack of polish I'm only talking about the gameplay. The artstyle looks rough in screenshots, but it's very effective in motion. The animations are conceptually very interesting and well executed, and the simplicity of the style benefits its more extreme scenes in a similar way pixel art benefits. More abstract can mean more evocative and expressionist.
You'll love this if you want to recapture the feeling of flash era games but with the game design and animation skills of way more recent work.
The problem is that it's very repetive, inventory management is tedious, the price of everything feels arbitrary, and it feels like most trips out spend more time getting enough herbs to get potions for you to use in the next trip, not just to sell.
If I could make a suggestion? Having each environ have an ingredient in the stage that can only be used in a potion that can only be sold for money. Either a few that are placed randomly, or a lot that are a constant across the entire map.
It would mean that each trip has an item that can only be monetized and has no opportunity cost for exploration or gathering, and the simplicity means that it's a lot easier to keep in your head relative to the wider grocery list all the other combinations require.
It would reduce fatigue to have more design choices like that. Right now the game suffers from not thinking enough about how its systems interact. As a result of all the different potion ingredients, combinations, limited bag size, biomes, sales system, and the low sell value of potions, it makes decisions that should be very simple unnecessarily significant and complicated because of the grinding involved.
Some combination of making ingredient stacks bigger, potion recipes cheaper and sales prices higher is probably needed, but this really needs more focus on game design going forward to prevent it from becoming something people just ask for the gallery rip for. Which would be tragic, because it's so close. All the pieces are here, they just need some sanding down to properly click together.
When I say lack of polish I'm only talking about the gameplay. The artstyle looks rough in screenshots, but it's very effective in motion. The animations are conceptually very interesting and well executed, and the simplicity of the style benefits its more extreme scenes in a similar way pixel art benefits. More abstract can mean more evocative and expressionist.
You'll love this if you want to recapture the feeling of flash era games but with the game design and animation skills of way more recent work.
The problem is that it's very repetive, inventory management is tedious, the price of everything feels arbitrary, and it feels like most trips out spend more time getting enough herbs to get potions for you to use in the next trip, not just to sell.
If I could make a suggestion? Having each environ have an ingredient in the stage that can only be used in a potion that can only be sold for money. Either a few that are placed randomly, or a lot that are a constant across the entire map.
It would mean that each trip has an item that can only be monetized and has no opportunity cost for exploration or gathering, and the simplicity means that it's a lot easier to keep in your head relative to the wider grocery list all the other combinations require.
It would reduce fatigue to have more design choices like that. Right now the game suffers from not thinking enough about how its systems interact. As a result of all the different potion ingredients, combinations, limited bag size, biomes, sales system, and the low sell value of potions, it makes decisions that should be very simple unnecessarily significant and complicated because of the grinding involved.
Some combination of making ingredient stacks bigger, potion recipes cheaper and sales prices higher is probably needed, but this really needs more focus on game design going forward to prevent it from becoming something people just ask for the gallery rip for. Which would be tragic, because it's so close. All the pieces are here, they just need some sanding down to properly click together.