Recent reviews by Kritis

I've skipped over all of the previous Natsume titles, but I wanted to give them a chance since the original trailer for this game looked really nice. The original Steam delay and lack of communication on Natsume's part other than a generic "we're working on it" message was frustrating, but I won't let that bias my review of the game.

The first thing I will say is that they had no shame ripping off BotW's UI, but I'm glad they did because it is incredibly clean. Everything from the minimap, to the inventory, and even the little location banner that pops up when you enter a new location looks identical to BotW. The games graphics are a step up from previous entries like Light of Hope, but they still leave a lot to be desired. The world feels very similar to the wild area from Pokemon SwSh, expansive and dull.

As for the PC port itself, this is one of the worst ports I've seen. Technically everything runs fine, I still manage 60fps on my old i7-3770k machine. But that's where the positives end. Obviously the elephant in the room is the lack of keyboard and mouse support. Titles like this I prefer to lean back and use my controller anyways, but that is a major negative for anyone without a controller, or would prefer keyboard and mouse controls. There's also no in-game display/graphics settings or controller rebinding settings. You can't even change the render resolution. The game has been stable for me though. 3 ½ hours in and I haven't experienced and crashes. This also runs flawlessly on my Steam Deck which is AWESOME!

Finally - the gameplay. It's a farm sim. You plant crops, you tend to those crops, make some friends, romance your sweetheart, etc. The core loop feels solid so far. The ability to obtain seeds in the wild without buying them is neat and random-ish crop mutations are really cool. I was surprised to see my first carrot be a black carrot and assumed something was amiss. The stamina system is a bit egregious, but it feels like Natsume wanted you to need to cook food and bring snacks to stay full when gathering. Pick up every forageable that you can because they are worth their weight in stamina. I highly recommend you take you time on your first 4 days to collect as much stone and lumber as you want to as your stamina is unlimited at first. I collected roughly 200 of each before thinking I had enough and moving on. Resources like wood and stone and be refined into other resources like lumber and resources stone similar to Pioneers of Olive Town, but without the need to place 50 different items all of your farmland. You have a workbench that does this in your house and an NPC that will refine your stone and ores.

Overall. I would say that this game has been a very enjoyable experience so far. I think $50 USD is a fair price range considering titles are going for $70 USD nowadays. The inclusion of day one DLC is rather annoying, but Marvelous has done similar things like locking marriage candidates behind DLC in Pioneers of Olive Town. If you're on the fence then give this game a try and don't refund it until you're out of the tutorial and can explore the open world (unless it refuses to run on your system as it has for others).

To everyone crashing after the intro cutscene please check the discussion boards. A fellow user found that if you have additional Video Codecs installed the game will crash. Uninstall K-Lite, or any other codec you may have to correct this. VLC video pack does seem to work with the game.

Don't go into this expecting a lot at the moment. This game is developed mainly by one person and has just hit early access. As far as I'm aware the only thing currently in the game is just looting and grinding. But if you go into the game with the right expectations and a few pals you can expect to have some good fun.