lemonadeserenade: Hi, I've been keeping this game under my wishlist for a while now, and are thinking to buy it because of the discount.
But I also been indecisive about this for quite some time, after reading some of the reviews..
I loved Stardew Valley, so I kinda expect this game can entertain me like Stardew does.
so here's my questions:
(1) How's the stuttering problem? is it still exist?
(2) been reading ppl complaining about the bad/slow grinding system, is is really that bad?
(3) read some comments too about some areas can't be accessed/serves no purposes, feels like an unfinished game?
(4) anything I should know about the pros and cons regarding the game, please let me know. Thank you
I held up on buying the game because I had the same questions. I finally bought it in the last sale, and I'm glad I did. Here's what I found so far (been playing 25+ hrs on version 1.2.5)
(1) there's no stuttering at all on my 4 year old MacBook Pro 13" (which has on-chip graphics), so you'll probably be fine, too
(2) there's a bit of grinding, which is to be expected in this type of game, but if you're clever and take notes, you can save quite some time. I started over after ~6 hrs, and it took me <3hrs to reach the same point in the game. In the reviews you will find people with 60 or 80hrs, on steam there's at least one person with 200hrs who posted an picture of their amazing graveyard. There's one unhappy camper on GOG who wrote he hates the game after putting in 60hrs. I don't think he hated all 60hrs, though ;-)
(3)The game feels finished to me, but all I know is the current version 1.205. From the reviews I gather that it may be that you can't access the town (not the village!), even though NPCs talk a fair bit about said town, and there is a gate. I would assume that is a design decision, the talk about the town helps the game come alive, which I am totally fine with. Maybe there will be a DLC later, maybe it's just a piece of the story that exists in dialogue only.
(4) the one thing I could not figure out by myself was that you have to use a bucket to obtain drops of water. the rest was actually pretty straightforward. If you play the German translation, there's 2-3 spelling errors, and some translations that make some types of wood product hard to tell apart.
As I said, it's a great game, and I'm happy to have bought it. After watching me play, my kids nagged me to by it for their iPad so they could play, too. Having tried both, I slightly prefer the desktop version to the iPad version, because I find touch controls are a bit slower. YMMV.
