Cryomancer
Arcane
How is magic in this game?
-
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KickStarter Kynseed - a sandbox RPG/life sim inspired by Ultima 7, from ex-Lionhead developers
- Thread starter LESS T_T
- Start date
LarryTyphoid
Scholar
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- Sep 16, 2021
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When it comes to fantasy life sims, you really can't beat modded Daggerfall and Skyrim.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,568
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2017
- Messages
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Looks incredibly homosexual
So I'm near what I think is the end of the game, and overall it's a pretty big disappointment. Wall of text incoming. Ask questions if you want because there's no way I can mention, in a single vaguely readable post, about even half of what Kynseed does or does not.
TL;DR: yet another game evidently not finished yet released, with, unrolled as if cause for pride, a glorious roadmap stretching some way into the future. And it is so painfully evident this roadmap contains all things the devs wanted to include in the game before releasing it, but couldn't because of time or money concerns. There are unforgivable bugs—some of which affect every single player without exception—and various problems that should absolutely not be in a game held four years in Early Access.
Also, the game is a most tedious chore to play, brimming with grind enough to rival Graveyard Keeper on release.
————————————————————————————
I see three clear positives:
— For anyone who likes this kind of aesthetic, the visuals are a real treat. Every inch of the world is colorful and detailed. The air undulates during hot days; godrays bathe areas of the ground during sunny days; fog floats thin and fresh, or blankets a marsh with such weight you can barely see beyond your nose; trees sway gently in a spring breeze, or shake and bow dangerously during a storm while lightning flashes and rain almost falls sideways. Every season is extremely distinct from the others. You can tell whether it's dawn or noon or late afternoon by the lighting alone. And they even managed to convincingly render the way the light of your lantern spreads through fog, which I think is no little feat.
— Aside from what I can only assume must be a recurring bug with the way music cycles from one track to another, the soundscape is very well made. Almost every area has its own track and all of them have a comfortable, warm bucolic feel to them, with some notable exceptions when the atmosphere demands a more eerie evocation. As for the sounds themselves, your can hear insects buzzing about the hot air during summer; leaves rustling in the wind that wooshes by; rain plinking against a body of water; owls hooting in the night; etc, etc... It's well made. Very agreeable.
— The setting is just plain queer and faerie-like, in that it is pretty and quite gay yet suffused with distinct undertones of menace. Sure, the air is warm and the forest is beautiful and oh! how golden-hued are the falling leaves—but as mood strikes it, a fae watching you from afar might decide to proffer a fresh apple, or to curse you into devouring your own father down to the last giblet. At times NPCs tell some downright depressing or horrible anecdotes that would doubtlessly please the Brothers Grimm.
As for the rest, i.e. the gameplay proper, it's not nearly as good. And I'm not sure where to start, nor how to order it all.
— The combat is actually interesting, the sprites and animations are very well made and readable, but it's extremely easy despite enemies having the potential to one-shot you. There are three dungeons, each a succession of 15 combat encounters. Aside from rare bosses and a couple of glitches, normal enemies wait patiently so as to not launch simultaneous attacks, meaning at least one spot out of three on your side of the screen is always a safe spot.
Healing is potent and plentiful and usable as a free action that pauses combat. There are no levels to be gained for your character. No skills to speak of. Your character has fixed stats that can only be momentarily boosted via foodstuffs. No interesting gear to find or craft. Various types of swords do more or less damage to this enemy, or to that one, and you're limited to two sword slots during a run so that part could have been interesting; but the devs butchered the numbers so at best there's a negligible difference in damage between your best and not-best sword. Archery does almost no damage, it's used to stun enemies for a few of seconds.
— In one very specific case the combat can become somewhat challenging: during a blood moon, more so if you're in the last depths of a dungeon. In such an event, everything is sped up quite a lot (I'd guess by two or three times), and enemies don't wait for others to finish before launching their own attacks, so no place is absolutely safe. Had every encounter unfolded under like conditions, it would have been nice.
— I've played a bit over two in-game years, I still have over twenty years of life ahead of me, and already I've almost finished the game, with numerous little secrets discovered. So if the starting character can finish the game so easily while seeing all there is to see, why the hell is there a whole system of siring generations of kids? Why?! People on the Steam forums seem equally perplexed as I am.
— The prologue-cum-tutorial takes an exceedingly long amount of time. You start as a 13-year-old living with your sibling and your uncle. Every day you get tasked with doing this or that, little things that combine into a glorified tutorial. How to interact with people, or collect milk, or earn a few coins, or briefly apprentice with some shop owner in the village. Thusly does a season unfold—and oh my god is it short yet feels so very long. The game shows you many of its aspects and teases a small world, but you're forcefully confined to a small corner in which you can't do much.
— The prologue ends; when the game really starts you're suddenly 18 and alone, with a manner of trickster fae 'helping' you from behind the scenes. The ultimate goal? Who the fuck knows... Raise your reputation, for some totally-not-meta reason. There's even a note nailed on a tree, telling you now you can actually do tons of stuff!
You can gather flowers and herbs; and shoot fruits down with your slingshot; and cast your lure in ponds and rivers and lakes and waterfalls, waiting for many fish to bite; and plant seeds and water them and harvest the result; and buy animals; and cook stews and make sandwiches and jams and soups and all things that sit warmly in your belly; and date then marry then bone; and enter baking contests; and forge a sword, the better to fight goblins and hags with. And many other things. You can do a lot.
Yet simultaneously, you can't do a lot—and when you can, you have precious little reason to do so.
You can be a farmer. But you can't till the soil. Instead you have to compose with what seedable area the devs gave you, and that can never be changed. Never. If you want marshmallows or aloe vera or mint or any number of plants and herbs for which seeds are not available, well, though shit, you're gonna have to find where they grow, and go back there every time you need some. Fruits? Apples, pears, and blueberries grow natively on your farm; everything else needs sought elsewhere. You can't plant trees. NPCs have hothouses for growing crops in any season, but you don't have that; you can learn a skill to that effect, but come on, that's just plain dumb in a game like this.
You can buy a smithy, and hire employees. But you can't tell them what items to favor or disfavor. Instead, the customers decide what you make and even at what price you sell it. You can't tell a lady customer you want to forge swords exclusively. Or rather you can refuse to serve her, rebuke her vain want for brilliant baubles, but then you take a hit to your reputation and since it's the one and only thing bringing you closer to the end of the game it's pretty damn important to not see it go down.
You can buy animals. But in a game whose promotion heavily emphasised passing generations and building a legacy, and in which every person or animal has permanent traits, well in such a game your animals can't breed. You get one cow, immortal and providing infinite milk. You can buy chickens, but your neighbors' chickens lay eggs you can take just like that. You can buy sheep, but they do almost nothing and there are sheep in the wild who act exactly like they belong to you.
Almost everything is like that. Sure, technically you can do this or that, but it's puddle-deep and extremely constricted on the sides. There's lots to do, but there's nothing to do.
— Buying a shop is beyond stupid. It needs said. You come to the counter, consult the ledger, give 500 to 2000 brass coins, and bam! the shop is yours. No arguing with the guy who owns it, no old guy who wants someone worthy of his life's work, no gaining his trust or friendship, nor rivalry, nothing. The smith in Woemarsh has worked that forge for about a century, so you'd think he'd be attached to the place, to his place; but no, apparently he doesn't give a shit.
— The fishing... dear god, the fishing. 22 years since Breath Of Fire 4, and still to my knowledge no game can boast of a better fishing mini-game.
— Befriending NPCs is exclusively a unilateral affair. They will never come to you; you have to do everything from beginning to end. So far, to see what I could get out of the whole affair, I've befriend 73 out of the 80 NPCs and did their personal pseudo-quest—and save a couple of cases it is a humdrum, wearisome endeavor. They reward you mostly with useless shit like an apple or some flowers, though a handful recounted anecdotes worthwile to the world-building and overall atmosphere.
— The process of getting married appears such a convoluted affair I gave up on the notion upon reading the laundry list of stuff to do. I just wanted to love the pink-haired girl who smells of iron, not get involved into a seven-day ritual of fetch quests.
— You can adopt children, or have your own to which you will pass your genes, making each generation stronger than the last. But you can't build your house or your estate. No room or annex for the kids. Hell, apparently you can't even share a bed with your spouse; you sleep in your own bed, and your spouse sleeps in what was your sibling's bed, on the opposite side of the room.
— The item rating system is maddeningly tedious and overly involved. Do you want or indeed require a specific 5-star fruit or plant? Ok, you'll have to harvest it on the 4th day of the 1st week of winter, while riding a pig, in the fog, at night but without your lantern, after having perfumed yourself. I'm barely exaggerating. The conditions are ridiculously convoluted. And they're tied to a system of proverbs and sayings you learn little by little, via notes or NPCs.
Of course you can get a 5-star Bogeyman Mushroom without knowning any of the proverbs linked to it, provided you chance upon the right conditions; but doing it this way won't trigger the discovery of said conditions within the in-game codex. Meaning you won't ever learn by yourself why that mushroom is rated 5 stars. And good luck guessing if it's because you picked it while accompanied by your dog, or your cat, or if it's because it's raining, or night, or precisely midnight, or because someone loves you, or because you currently suffer from flatulence after eating some cabbage earlier (I swear I'm not making this up, those are some actual conditions in the game).
— There are six Masters to be readily found in the world. Masters respectively of Exploration, Gardening, Cooking, Fishing, Melee Combat, and Ranged Combat. In exchange for a bevy of items of various qualities, they can teach you 'skills'. Some are nice, like crops watering themselves; others are utterly laughable in how useless they are, like more dough to roll when baking pies. You'd think the Master of Cooking could actually teach you recipes, or the Master of Gardening could teach you how to grow exceptional pumpkins; but no, nothing of the sort. I actually laughed out loud when the Master of Exploration told me, in awed terms, how he had discovered a certain type of rare ore; yeah buddy, that's great, but my dog unearthed a chunk of that ore some twenty hours ago—some Master you are, indeed most deserving of that capital 'M'.
— And there are heaps more things wrong with the game. But I should like to mention one of the multitudinous so-called 'lore books' found within the game:
No, devs, no. When your game is 10% substance for 90% padding, you don't get to maladroitly poke fun at grinding in old games. Not without looking like a dick, anyway. Presently I have almost nothing left to do save waiting for my four smiths to earn thousands of Reputation Points. So your game is grinding itself—poke fun at that, would you.
/e: spelling.
TL;DR: yet another game evidently not finished yet released, with, unrolled as if cause for pride, a glorious roadmap stretching some way into the future. And it is so painfully evident this roadmap contains all things the devs wanted to include in the game before releasing it, but couldn't because of time or money concerns. There are unforgivable bugs—some of which affect every single player without exception—and various problems that should absolutely not be in a game held four years in Early Access.
Also, the game is a most tedious chore to play, brimming with grind enough to rival Graveyard Keeper on release.
————————————————————————————
I see three clear positives:
— For anyone who likes this kind of aesthetic, the visuals are a real treat. Every inch of the world is colorful and detailed. The air undulates during hot days; godrays bathe areas of the ground during sunny days; fog floats thin and fresh, or blankets a marsh with such weight you can barely see beyond your nose; trees sway gently in a spring breeze, or shake and bow dangerously during a storm while lightning flashes and rain almost falls sideways. Every season is extremely distinct from the others. You can tell whether it's dawn or noon or late afternoon by the lighting alone. And they even managed to convincingly render the way the light of your lantern spreads through fog, which I think is no little feat.
— Aside from what I can only assume must be a recurring bug with the way music cycles from one track to another, the soundscape is very well made. Almost every area has its own track and all of them have a comfortable, warm bucolic feel to them, with some notable exceptions when the atmosphere demands a more eerie evocation. As for the sounds themselves, your can hear insects buzzing about the hot air during summer; leaves rustling in the wind that wooshes by; rain plinking against a body of water; owls hooting in the night; etc, etc... It's well made. Very agreeable.
— The setting is just plain queer and faerie-like, in that it is pretty and quite gay yet suffused with distinct undertones of menace. Sure, the air is warm and the forest is beautiful and oh! how golden-hued are the falling leaves—but as mood strikes it, a fae watching you from afar might decide to proffer a fresh apple, or to curse you into devouring your own father down to the last giblet. At times NPCs tell some downright depressing or horrible anecdotes that would doubtlessly please the Brothers Grimm.
As for the rest, i.e. the gameplay proper, it's not nearly as good. And I'm not sure where to start, nor how to order it all.
— The combat is actually interesting, the sprites and animations are very well made and readable, but it's extremely easy despite enemies having the potential to one-shot you. There are three dungeons, each a succession of 15 combat encounters. Aside from rare bosses and a couple of glitches, normal enemies wait patiently so as to not launch simultaneous attacks, meaning at least one spot out of three on your side of the screen is always a safe spot.
Healing is potent and plentiful and usable as a free action that pauses combat. There are no levels to be gained for your character. No skills to speak of. Your character has fixed stats that can only be momentarily boosted via foodstuffs. No interesting gear to find or craft. Various types of swords do more or less damage to this enemy, or to that one, and you're limited to two sword slots during a run so that part could have been interesting; but the devs butchered the numbers so at best there's a negligible difference in damage between your best and not-best sword. Archery does almost no damage, it's used to stun enemies for a few of seconds.
— In one very specific case the combat can become somewhat challenging: during a blood moon, more so if you're in the last depths of a dungeon. In such an event, everything is sped up quite a lot (I'd guess by two or three times), and enemies don't wait for others to finish before launching their own attacks, so no place is absolutely safe. Had every encounter unfolded under like conditions, it would have been nice.
— I've played a bit over two in-game years, I still have over twenty years of life ahead of me, and already I've almost finished the game, with numerous little secrets discovered. So if the starting character can finish the game so easily while seeing all there is to see, why the hell is there a whole system of siring generations of kids? Why?! People on the Steam forums seem equally perplexed as I am.
— The prologue-cum-tutorial takes an exceedingly long amount of time. You start as a 13-year-old living with your sibling and your uncle. Every day you get tasked with doing this or that, little things that combine into a glorified tutorial. How to interact with people, or collect milk, or earn a few coins, or briefly apprentice with some shop owner in the village. Thusly does a season unfold—and oh my god is it short yet feels so very long. The game shows you many of its aspects and teases a small world, but you're forcefully confined to a small corner in which you can't do much.
— The prologue ends; when the game really starts you're suddenly 18 and alone, with a manner of trickster fae 'helping' you from behind the scenes. The ultimate goal? Who the fuck knows... Raise your reputation, for some totally-not-meta reason. There's even a note nailed on a tree, telling you now you can actually do tons of stuff!
You can gather flowers and herbs; and shoot fruits down with your slingshot; and cast your lure in ponds and rivers and lakes and waterfalls, waiting for many fish to bite; and plant seeds and water them and harvest the result; and buy animals; and cook stews and make sandwiches and jams and soups and all things that sit warmly in your belly; and date then marry then bone; and enter baking contests; and forge a sword, the better to fight goblins and hags with. And many other things. You can do a lot.
Yet simultaneously, you can't do a lot—and when you can, you have precious little reason to do so.
You can be a farmer. But you can't till the soil. Instead you have to compose with what seedable area the devs gave you, and that can never be changed. Never. If you want marshmallows or aloe vera or mint or any number of plants and herbs for which seeds are not available, well, though shit, you're gonna have to find where they grow, and go back there every time you need some. Fruits? Apples, pears, and blueberries grow natively on your farm; everything else needs sought elsewhere. You can't plant trees. NPCs have hothouses for growing crops in any season, but you don't have that; you can learn a skill to that effect, but come on, that's just plain dumb in a game like this.
You can buy a smithy, and hire employees. But you can't tell them what items to favor or disfavor. Instead, the customers decide what you make and even at what price you sell it. You can't tell a lady customer you want to forge swords exclusively. Or rather you can refuse to serve her, rebuke her vain want for brilliant baubles, but then you take a hit to your reputation and since it's the one and only thing bringing you closer to the end of the game it's pretty damn important to not see it go down.
You can buy animals. But in a game whose promotion heavily emphasised passing generations and building a legacy, and in which every person or animal has permanent traits, well in such a game your animals can't breed. You get one cow, immortal and providing infinite milk. You can buy chickens, but your neighbors' chickens lay eggs you can take just like that. You can buy sheep, but they do almost nothing and there are sheep in the wild who act exactly like they belong to you.
Almost everything is like that. Sure, technically you can do this or that, but it's puddle-deep and extremely constricted on the sides. There's lots to do, but there's nothing to do.
— Buying a shop is beyond stupid. It needs said. You come to the counter, consult the ledger, give 500 to 2000 brass coins, and bam! the shop is yours. No arguing with the guy who owns it, no old guy who wants someone worthy of his life's work, no gaining his trust or friendship, nor rivalry, nothing. The smith in Woemarsh has worked that forge for about a century, so you'd think he'd be attached to the place, to his place; but no, apparently he doesn't give a shit.
— The fishing... dear god, the fishing. 22 years since Breath Of Fire 4, and still to my knowledge no game can boast of a better fishing mini-game.
— Befriending NPCs is exclusively a unilateral affair. They will never come to you; you have to do everything from beginning to end. So far, to see what I could get out of the whole affair, I've befriend 73 out of the 80 NPCs and did their personal pseudo-quest—and save a couple of cases it is a humdrum, wearisome endeavor. They reward you mostly with useless shit like an apple or some flowers, though a handful recounted anecdotes worthwile to the world-building and overall atmosphere.
— The process of getting married appears such a convoluted affair I gave up on the notion upon reading the laundry list of stuff to do. I just wanted to love the pink-haired girl who smells of iron, not get involved into a seven-day ritual of fetch quests.
— You can adopt children, or have your own to which you will pass your genes, making each generation stronger than the last. But you can't build your house or your estate. No room or annex for the kids. Hell, apparently you can't even share a bed with your spouse; you sleep in your own bed, and your spouse sleeps in what was your sibling's bed, on the opposite side of the room.
— The item rating system is maddeningly tedious and overly involved. Do you want or indeed require a specific 5-star fruit or plant? Ok, you'll have to harvest it on the 4th day of the 1st week of winter, while riding a pig, in the fog, at night but without your lantern, after having perfumed yourself. I'm barely exaggerating. The conditions are ridiculously convoluted. And they're tied to a system of proverbs and sayings you learn little by little, via notes or NPCs.
Of course you can get a 5-star Bogeyman Mushroom without knowning any of the proverbs linked to it, provided you chance upon the right conditions; but doing it this way won't trigger the discovery of said conditions within the in-game codex. Meaning you won't ever learn by yourself why that mushroom is rated 5 stars. And good luck guessing if it's because you picked it while accompanied by your dog, or your cat, or if it's because it's raining, or night, or precisely midnight, or because someone loves you, or because you currently suffer from flatulence after eating some cabbage earlier (I swear I'm not making this up, those are some actual conditions in the game).
— There are six Masters to be readily found in the world. Masters respectively of Exploration, Gardening, Cooking, Fishing, Melee Combat, and Ranged Combat. In exchange for a bevy of items of various qualities, they can teach you 'skills'. Some are nice, like crops watering themselves; others are utterly laughable in how useless they are, like more dough to roll when baking pies. You'd think the Master of Cooking could actually teach you recipes, or the Master of Gardening could teach you how to grow exceptional pumpkins; but no, nothing of the sort. I actually laughed out loud when the Master of Exploration told me, in awed terms, how he had discovered a certain type of rare ore; yeah buddy, that's great, but my dog unearthed a chunk of that ore some twenty hours ago—some Master you are, indeed most deserving of that capital 'M'.
— And there are heaps more things wrong with the game. But I should like to mention one of the multitudinous so-called 'lore books' found within the game:
No, devs, no. When your game is 10% substance for 90% padding, you don't get to maladroitly poke fun at grinding in old games. Not without looking like a dick, anyway. Presently I have almost nothing left to do save waiting for my four smiths to earn thousands of Reputation Points. So your game is grinding itself—poke fun at that, would you.
/e: spelling.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2017
- Messages
- 31,745
You look at the game and don't assume it's full homogay and thus bad?
rusty_shackleford
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2018
- Messages
- 50,754
is it as gay as it looks?
I would agree with most of Dhaze 's points, but I have to say I'm still enjoying the game a lot.
I have not played a game in years with such a fantastically crafted art style, music and setting design.
It's all just so wonderfully queer (in the original meaning of the word) and whimsical, while clearly alluding to darker things behind the facade.
Just buy the soundtrack if you are not interested in the game.
Although I haven't finished the game, I'd say that it is no doubt worth investing a dozen hours or more for the graphics, soundscape and initial discoveries alone.
No idea why you'd want to play a second playthrough, though.
You have no real agenda in this game, unlike eg Stardew Valley which lets you at least customize your farm. Any playthrough would be like the previous one.
You just cast your line, wait (and maybe wiggle) and you get a fish or cast again. That's all.
Mercifully uninvolved, although that does put it in stark contrast with the other activities.
Maybe you'd get some kind of "true ending" when you fulfill everything, get all the families' secrets, etc. ?
But even that could almost certainly be done with just one character.
Still, it's super odd how involved it all is considering you can most likely get it all done with your first character.
One thing you'd definitely need multiple generations for would be to create your ubermensch with high stats in everything.
However, everything is easy even for your starting dude - in some cases maybe requiring multiple attempts to succeed, eg getting your partner pregnant (or yourself, I guess), but that's it.
Maybe they implemented that system so that they can have real consequences from getting killed in the dungeons (which costs you 1 year of your life)?
I have a feeling the game was not designed for a hardcore audience, given how easy everything is.
Also, purchasing all of the relics (which have a literal lifetime cost as well) would probably cost a significant amount of hours as well.
I have not played a game in years with such a fantastically crafted art style, music and setting design.
It's all just so wonderfully queer (in the original meaning of the word) and whimsical, while clearly alluding to darker things behind the facade.
Just buy the soundtrack if you are not interested in the game.
Although I haven't finished the game, I'd say that it is no doubt worth investing a dozen hours or more for the graphics, soundscape and initial discoveries alone.
No idea why you'd want to play a second playthrough, though.
You have no real agenda in this game, unlike eg Stardew Valley which lets you at least customize your farm. Any playthrough would be like the previous one.
I don't know about that. I'm actually quite happy it's NOT yet another fishing mini-game.
You just cast your line, wait (and maybe wiggle) and you get a fish or cast again. That's all.
Mercifully uninvolved, although that does put it in stark contrast with the other activities.
Yup...
Maybe you'd get some kind of "true ending" when you fulfill everything, get all the families' secrets, etc. ?
But even that could almost certainly be done with just one character.
Still, it's super odd how involved it all is considering you can most likely get it all done with your first character.
One thing you'd definitely need multiple generations for would be to create your ubermensch with high stats in everything.
However, everything is easy even for your starting dude - in some cases maybe requiring multiple attempts to succeed, eg getting your partner pregnant (or yourself, I guess), but that's it.
Maybe they implemented that system so that they can have real consequences from getting killed in the dungeons (which costs you 1 year of your life)?
I have a feeling the game was not designed for a hardcore audience, given how easy everything is.
Also, purchasing all of the relics (which have a literal lifetime cost as well) would probably cost a significant amount of hours as well.
Last edited:
Well, upon launching the game for the first time I instantly became 100% gaysexual, with pixie dust instead of blood, and even an unnatural manner of love for ponies. So... yeah, it's the gayest thing since Alan Carr.
Indeed the overall art style and ambiance is wonderful, in the litteral sense of the word. My main problem with it is that a huge number of the most worthwile discoveries are gated behind a tedious, almost mechanical grind.
For example, the Cowe family. Pat the mother, Tom the father, Milly and Billy the kids, who all live in a big house, and Pappy Cowe who lives a bit to the side in a small house.
Pat, eventually happy to talk to me because unlike her husband I'm not a drunk, confided in me that she and Tom had another child before the two they now have; but something terrible happened to that child, and she wouldn't say more. Milly knows, somehow, she technically has a brother other than Billy, but is frightened of the details. And Billy thinks Tom drinks heavily because of what happened to the child that was there before. As it turns out, Pappy Cowe is that child, named Peppy, cursed by the fae to be an old man because when he was seven he peed on a Goddess statue.
In a similar vein, the Buckle brothers.
Their dad was an alcoholic who drowned clutching a barrel of ale, and their mother was pecked to death by rapacious chickens.
And Herbert Lemon.
His mother was human, his father a gnome. The gnomes, angry at this union, cursed Herbert, imprisonned his father in Tir Na Nog, and saw that his mother be devoured by monsters while she searched after her disappeared love.
It really is Grimm tale-like, and makes for a deeply weird, unsettling world. But every little detail like that can only be uncovered by befriending NPCs. This is the real recompense for doing so; not the apple pies, or five-star sword, or scroll for slingshot proficiency they eventually gift in return. And there is only one way to befriend them: gift them a lot of stuff, repeatedly. In one word: grind.
All those details should be part of the main narrative. Why the devs decided to gated it all behind boring, repetitive tasks, is beyond me.
That's perhaps the part annoys me the most. It's the kind of game that, fundamentally, should lend itself to replays. Yet I don't see myself replaying it ever. Meanwhile, I've replayed every game like Stardew Valley, various Harvest Moon entries, Rune Factory, etc...
Oh, I should have been a lot clearer about that.
I actually don't have a problem with the fact it's not, as you say, yet another mini-game. But there needs to be a tiny bit more to it. At least they should give different shadow shapes to most fish, so I can tell at a glance whether it's a huge pike or a tiny minnow or some weird faery fish I've not yet hooked. And fix the fish swimming underground in some locations. And fix the fish darting around like crazy because the spot in which your lure sank is, for some reason, inaccessible to them.
Yeah, I though about that too. But my god, talk about a time sink. I'm usually keen on hunting little secrets—and have already found a good number of them in Kynseed—but what a daunting task, that of uncovering it all just for a potential secret ending.
Agreed with all of that, and the bolded part in particular.
Still, all in all I'm enjoying Kynseed for what it is, if only for the amazing visuals and eerie ambiance. But as I said I don't see myself replaying it afterwards, which not only is a first for me with this kind of game but also is doubly sad given the whole 'have kids and create an empire' angle of Kynseed.
FriendlyMerchant
Guest
They should rename the game to "Kysneed."
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