This game is a cool concept, bringing together lots of fun ideas. A game like this should be great.

It is unfortunate, therefore, that the game is tedious and boring. Even at the fastest speeds, it takes you ages to accomplish anything, and in the meanwhile, there's nothing fun going on. It doesn't even idle, allowing you to do something else on your phone or another monitor. Instead, you've got lots of little low-level problems to deal with, none of which matter when you achieve the goal but also any of which could balloon into a major issue if you're not careful. This was true years ago and it's true now, the main difference is just that the tedium now continues for longer.

It's like the first game but roads work better. Definitely a lot of little rough edges at launch but the game is fundamentally fun, and based on prior performance this developer will continue improving it. If you're not that big on city builders then it's fine to wait for a sale since, like most games, it will only get better with future updates.

People are complaining about performance but it's fine for me. I just didn't leave the settings on defaults. The defaults are legitimately not that good, but the game runs fine on my machine.

Before the term "colony management genre" was coined, those games were called DF-lites. It's the genesis of the genre, but unlike others, the whole world is generated.

My first fort in this version:
One of my fisherdwarves started fighting some crows. The crows were dead. One bit off his hand while another disemboweled him, causing him to bleed out and die. After that, he returned to the fort with his guts dragging behind him and his hand scuttling alongside, and killed his former compatriots. None of this was scripted, all of it was dynamic, and my fort crumbled to its end.

I hate this game, not just because it isn't fun, but because it always tricks me into thinking it'll be fun. Every time there's a new expansion, it sounds cool, and I try it, and it's not.

The fundamental problem is that the core gameplay loop involves waiting and doing tedious busy work in order to get to the payoff later in the game but there isn't actually a payoff, there's just the idea of one. The most any expansion does is add something that's a little better at distracting you from the fact that you're not having fun, but at the end of the playthrough you still end up realizing you've blown your time and energy making yourself less happy than when you started.

It's got fish, and I mean that's what you want from an aquarium game, right?

The gameplay is well designed to facilitate the core concept of building tanks and enjoying fish and it works great if you want that. Very peaceful.

From a tech perspective it's imperfect, with occasional bugs and I got a recurring one where things I was trying to build became invisible and I had to guess where they'd appear until the bug resolved itself.

Feature-wise, the one thing I miss is that the fish don't really interact with each other, aside from eating each other sometimes. But they don't really form schools and clown fish don't especially care about anemones.

But there's lots of different fish, and they all swim and look pretty. It's nice.

This is what a story-based strategy game should be. The gameplay follows the march of history with some allowance for variation but all the mechanics make a historical playthrough feel natural and accurate, and the quests give you direction as you pursue victory rather than, as in many games, being a mere distraction.

It covers an interesting setting that is only more interesting because of its historicity, and is fun in its own right with educational merit as a happy addition.

As for replayability, which others have complained of, it is a (relatively short) narrative game, and so it does fall off under repeated playthroughs. That said, the game keeps score constantly, making it fun to play for purely mechanical reasons. There are constant "trials" - special events that tax your resources heavily - and winning the game takes proper prioritization and timing - and once you do, there's a score built from your acheivements and your decisions at game start. While the game may not be the sort I'd put a thousand hours into, it's definitely worth more than a single playthrough, and although it's short, it's also cheap.

A while back, I played a demo, as I often do, of a game in development, and was blown away by the potential. But it seemed too ambitious to see fruition, so I thought little of it. So many projects die unfulfilled. Now, after a successful kickstarter and a reasonable period of development, ScalemaiL have reminded us that not every great idea dies early. The first episode took what was a cool premise and fulfilled it entirely, with only more to come.

This is a narrative game that ultimately revolves around a puzzle. How does this creature work, and how are you going to kill it before it kills you? A simple premise, but one built upon in great layers. It makes you think, makes you choose, and then rewards your choices at the end with a logical and consistant but unforgiving and ultimately rewarding finale.

And yet this is just the framework. The story of the game weaves in so much more. Themes of growth are common in media, the country boy in a big city is a cliché of decades past. But rarely is it done in a way that feels so believable, with so little false pretense, and which still does more than such stories usually do. This one shows the mindset of a religious person, self-alienating into fundamentalism, and yet does so without being preachy or dogmatic, only conveying a realistic scenario despite the fantasy setting.

Protagonist believability may not be the norm for visual novels, but it's present here. All of the characters, in fact, never once felt unrealistic or trite, but the protagonist is even more so. He's not a walking power fantasy – in fact he's kind of pathetic in a lot of ways – but he also doesn't make stupid choices for no reason, simply to further the story or introduce conflict. He does make some poor decisions, but his emotional reasons are always clear, and so rather than being annoyed by his choices, I was left thinking he did pretty well given his emotional state.

But it is still a fantasy setting. As much as the interpersonal relations feel as though they could be contemporary, and the geopolitics feel medieval, huge parts of the game revolve around mystical antagonists, and what relationship the protagonist might or might not have with a particularly irregular one. You'll find no answer to that yet though – this is an episodic series and not all of it is released yet.

Because this is mostly a written game, I should also comment on the prose style as with a novel. First of all, the vocabulary is pretty extensive. I found this pleasant, but for a child or for someone who learned English as a second language, it might be frustrating depending on reading level. It's also written with a lot of stylization. Major characters each have their own unique way of speaking, and some of them, also, might be a bit tough if you're not familiar with colloquial English. Even if you're entirely fluent, there's one stylistic choice that might make certain bits a bit tough. The story is told entirely from within the mind of the protagonist, and this is reflected in format; though spoken word is denoted by a m-dash (—) it is often mixed with the protagonist's thoughts on it and not separated using quotation marks. I'm very skilled in English (in fact I've taught it) but although the words are normally laid out in an intuitive way, I found myself needing to reread some lines of dialogue nonetheless. While I think most of the choices in the prose reinforce the tone and portray the setting in a lively way, this last bit is one where I think too much is sacrificed for too little.

It's an episodic game, by the way, and I'm writing this with only one of five chapters out, but the first one has a satisfactory ending. Even though there's still major story threads left open, it doesn't leave you on a cliffhanger.

First of all, format: The whole thing is in traditional VN-style 2D aside from the fight scenes, which are isometric on a grid. There are some stunning visual set-pieces which are works of art in their own right, but for the most part, landscapes and areas are content to remain backgrounds, and although they're beautiful if you take the time to study them, you probably won't do that much. The character art, on the other hand, uses clear lines and bright colors to contrast well with the backdrops, adapting Franco-Belgian cartooning techniques to more complex medium in order to put your eye where it should be. This art doesn't particularly stand out among VNs, though it is relatively good among those that don't use an anime style.

As for the isometric battle views, they're entirely functional and do a solid job of displaying the action, but they feel a bit lackluster compared to the rest of the art. I think that the fights could have used their own illustrations specific to some key events and actions, but alas, the kickstarter didn't go high enough for that kind of stretch goal.

Lastly, the UI is functionally pretty typical to a game made in Ren'Py, but aesthetically it (like the rest of this game) is unusually polished and pleasing.

Overall, the music is much like the background art: Pleasing, suitable to the context, and unobtrusive. Sound effects are also well used, where they're present: Appropriate, and the correct level of obtrusiveness. But there's not a ton of them.

This VN isn't voiced at all in any language; in my opinion that's a good thing given the quality of VA that games (and especially small games) tend to get.

• A simple mechanic of information gathering based on choices to discern a mystery becomes rewarding through the details
• Characters and story are incredibly believably written. Fleshed-out world does a decent job at portraying the real world.
• Prose might be a bit of an obstacle for those with limited proficiency in reading English.
• Some dialogue is difficult to differentiate from the protagonist's thoughts.
• Not a lot of choices, but the ones present matter more than you'd normally expect this early in a story.
• All options seem viable one way or another, except when in a life or death situation, when anything that makes sense is viable.
• Art is overall quite pretty, fightscene bits are serviceable. Sound does its job and nothing more.

A beautiful work of fantasy, enjoyable and mentally stimulating. Thematically more mature than many VNs on Steam. Tough prose if you don't read English well, but worth it. I'm eagerly awaiting the next chapter.