If you've nostalgia it's a double edged sword. If you're coming off the GBA or PS1 era and thinking you're going to work hard to get a greenhouse then you can spend all time indoors to farm and raise animals, then spend your days socializng in town, well....

Tough. Despite the GBA having a hidden greenhouse with sun orbs or something to unlock it, and the ps1 having a home extension for it, for whatever reason Story of Seasons I guess lost greenhouse technology in the lawsuit against Natsume when they lost the Harvest Moon name. That or the Japanese can't do remasters well and it was just too hard or simply forgot, it's mind boggling that the only end game goal is a totally worthless villa.

End game doesn't have indoor gardening and even tho you can get something to increase your stamina and reduce it's tool use cost, you're still spending all day watering plants to make any kind of money and gutting your time with people. Basically pick if you want to be social or successful. And the quality of life on the plants letting you walk through them instead of forcing you to plan out a garden to work around both your watering can's level and reach, as well as your characters gathering and harvesting reach, is a bit of a let down to be honest. It's easier, but takes away some of the charm.

For a game meant for nostalgia bait, it's a bit awkward or off putting with the writing being literally for toddlers, to the point that they don't reference alcohol in a world with a literal gd vineyard and wife complaining her husband goes to the Inn every night to drink their stock away. Let's be honest, you're remastering a nostalgia bait title from a few decades ago, you can get over the clowns in the english ESG telling you to censor the word "alcohol" in localization. Promise. Sit in on a COD lobby sometime and listen to the age range of the "rated M for Mature" and see how well that flies across the industry.

The tools are rebalanced weird, the scythe is way, way too easy to level up and you'll have almost all the wood needed for most of your home and barn expansions before you can get the axe to gold, for whatever reason it's worlds harder to level than the rest. It's so wildly divergent from the other tools that it feels like it got the values mixed up from the scythe or something.

If you like the 2.5D, top down iso look of harvest moons, ie old Rune Factory, SNES to PS1 era Harvest moon, handheld titles or Stardew Valley, you could certainly do worse than this title. But given most of those titles are also on Steam, you could also do better frankly. Disappointed in this remake as it feels like (and is literally in some ways) going backwards in tech and complexity.

Also actual riot for no DLC to marry the Harvest Goddess, nor homewreck on Manna and Duke since he wants to spend all his time at the bar

Mid to early-mid game becomes such a chore as to deter continued playing.

NPCs tend to be genuinely unlikeable, portraying an accurate and inventive depiction of Hell in having to deal with the everyone's completely unhinged demands to make any sort of progress.

Like a halloween town version of Stardew Valley but more shallow and annoying. Scratches the itch for that sort of game for a while, but the continued annoyances and 'asks' of the game to keep going make me reconsider if it's worth the ever growing list of BS entitled strangers want to demand of you in a game about chill farming and property management.

Stardew gives you an early game quest that's OPTIONAL, to talk to everyone in the town. This game demands you speak to every random hobo on the off chance they're the only mf who can sell the trash you need to get NPCs to do their job, grinding everything to a standstill in the name of 'comedy' I guess.

Was fun until forced 3d platforming parkour. Dungeon floors around level 6 introduce floor layouts more mirror's edge or minecraft adventure maps than the dungeon crawl it was the first few floors, and likely past refund eligible 2 hours of gameplay.

Fun game, on launch connection issues are complete trash though. Don't play during peak hours unless you enjoy going 4-5 rounds in a 5 round game, only to have a connection error every time and not get rewarded anything.

Interesting mechanic and enjoyable room escape game. Short and the end game felt easier than a hurdle in the middle, but over all worth a look. The mechanic would be more at home in a sanity or questioning reality setting or story, or thriller or horror genre.

Slow burn to get going and really hit it's stride, but highly recommended if you're going in blind and unspoiled. I'll have to buy the dlc artbook pack to support the dev for this one.

This is a tough game to review. Over all, I don't think I can recommend the game to most people at full retail price. Currently (at the time of writing), the game is on sale for a dollar and that's an okay recommend just for the weirdness that's involved and obvious creativity that went into the game, but at full price it's not worth the cost of admission in my opinion.

A few issues to critique first. The polish and handling of the game on a controller is all over the place. The controls feel floaty and way too much momentum in flying sections, and glitchy in some of the exploration sections.

Aside from the controls, the game itself as far as tone, design and difficulty need to be addressed. The game has wildly varying focus, if the devs stuck to just trying to make a modern love-letter to Out of This World, then that'd have been enough. The world, design and creative feel all made the game worth while in the surreal enviornments and bizarre atmosphere. But too many game mechanics are thrown in at random. Flying shooters, flying avoiding hazards minigames, flying side scroller minigames, very anemic top down shooter section, brick break style games. It's a mess, and feels like the devs worried too much about the creepy vibe and exploration mechanics of OoTW would bore players into not playing.

Also worth note, is the game itself feels ashamed of what it is. Fourth Wall breaking jokes come in all over the place, and really dampens the immersion of the game itself. It feels like two games trying to be realized at once, a tongue-in-cheek self aware parody game that can lean on ♥♥♥♥♥♥ design because "lol random" and a game with much more to offer story and world building wise. With some polish and focus, this game series or devs will have a lot of future potential. Just need to really focused in their design. Floaty control feel, unclear hitboxes on both the player character and instant kill environments and nearly every hazard being an instant death scenario don't do the game many favors over all.

This isn't to say there isn't good in here. The artwork all around is interesting and unique. The vibe is jarring at times with transition to pretty well done anime babe styles suddenly jolting to a nightmarish alien planet, but given that it's reserved to human characters the stark contrast isn't too bad. Lots of games have characters and NPCs looking noticably different to the ambient style. The world itself is pretty enjoyable to explore, and I'd have much prefered the entire game play like the first few levels of trial and error exploration in an alien world of endless nightmare fuel. The flying sections, brick break mechanics and instant death side scroll sections really drag the game down.

If you want to see more from the devs, and I do to be honest, grab the game on sale or support their work by recommending the game to friends who have some cash to burn. But the unpolished state the game is in now stops me from giving this a thumbs up at full retail price. Grab it on sale for a weird, sometimes frustrating but always surreal ride.

I'll lead this non-recommendation with the fact that this game just isn't my style, or genre. I'd thought it would be a metroidvania style game and bought the tagline of "no arbitrary difficulty". It's a game meant for a very different playstyle, appealing to fast paced frustration bullet-hell games and platformers. If that's you're bag, then it's an easy recommend. But if it's a metroidvania style game or something akin to Cave Story, save yourself the cash and heartache.

That being said, I can't think of a game I wanted to like more than this one. The asthetic and art style were really captivating, but even on easy mode it was a god awful nightmare to play. Games like Dark Souls and Super Meat Boy are challenging but fair, but I didn't quite get that from WoV. It did feel artificially difficult and the level design and color pallet choices made it hard to tell what was and what wasn't a wall or ledge to fall through or pass through. It must appeal and do well for the gamers it aims at, I think I must have just gotten caught in the crossfire. Loved the style, but gameplay was frustrating to the point of being unplayable for me.

My only regret is that it was given to me as a gift, and I feel like my friends money was wasted thanks to my own lapse in judgement before looking over reviews and gameplay before adding this title to my wishlist.