Forager Gameplay Journal
Title: Forager Publisher: Humble Bundle
Year: 2019 ESRB Rating: None (even checked with esrb.org)
Platform: PC Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie, Simulation
Story: While there isn't a story per-se, the general premise is that you are a dude stuck on an island and you have to forage the resources of the land around you to acquire enough currency to purchase other lands. By purchasing other lands you can acquire new resources to build even more things.The final goal is to unlock the island with the final boss lair and beat the final boss once you're geared up enough.
Characters: While the game has NPCs you can converse with, they're nothing more than quest givers, and while they have quirky personalities, they are virtually lifeless and unimportant. The player is a white silhouette of a male who doesn't speak, so there's not much life there either.
Graphics: The game's graphics are in homage to the old 2D pixel art days, like Zelda: Link to the Past. That said, the game does live to that era of pixel graphics: Decently fluid animations, shading / lighting effects, vivid color schemes for enemies, NPCs and resources alike. In a way, the white silhouette of the player makes him pop out so much it's impossible to lose sight of him in any landscape.
Audio: So this is a weird one: It has a blend of modern sounding music blended with traditional, old school adventure themes. The sound effects of the tools, enemies and NPCs are also modern sounding. However, nearly everything involving the player actions sounds 8-bit in nature, from walking around to taking damage. It's also a toss up whether an enemy sounds more modern, 32/64 bit sounding with his attacks / taking damage or whether it's 8-bit like the player. All in all it doesn't affect the play experience of the game, no sound, regardless of style, is off-putting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0f9Piy5zUI
The above link will take you a commentary-less video involving gameplay footage of the game.
@ 0:35 is the start of a decent walking sound effect duration, so you can really tell how 8-bit the walking animation sound effect is.
Level Design: The game is played in 3rd quarter top down, and as such the levels are flat, mostly square-ish islands with occasional holes in them. As far as the dungeons go, they are pretty linearly designed with hardly any deviance in terms of secrets rooms and the like. In the overworld there are only a few different island types (that I've unlocked so far), basic forest, desert and cursed earth, where the undead live. The sparse dungeons follow the same hierarchy in terms of color scheme and design as the island they're based on: lots of forest-y stuff in the forest levels, lots of purple and a decaying, crypt feeling for the undead islands, etc.
Controls: The vast majority of the game plays with the mouse, from selecting menu options, to selecting targets to interact with, either by harvesting or attacking them. It uses standard WASD movement for the player, and supports controllers, though I don't have one to test the fluidity of the buttons. There are a few options in the inventory screen to drop and sort items as well, nothing fancy.
Learning Curve: This game is easy and remains so. You start on an island with nothing but resources to harvest and no enemies, and spend a decent amount of time building infrastructure to support buying other cheap, nearby islands. Even after a handful of islands you only encounter slimes to fight, and they're as throw-away of a mob as the passive mobs, like chickens and cows, that you merely kill for resources. Even some of the later mobs, like autonomous turrets and fiery skulls and imps have a basic charge attack or occasionally fire an easily dodge-able laser. Even if you get hit you merely eat food that restores health, which you get merely by collecting other resources through easy to craft fish traps, and that's an instantaneous heal, so if you slap that food on your hot bar nothing should kill you while you learn the systems.
Fun Factor: So this game is clearly not for everyone. If you're looking for a chill, Minecraft-esc experience then you'll probably find this fun: The rush of gathering loads of resources to make stuffs to get even more resources, and so on and so forth. I personally find it fun, but that's really all it brings to the table, as if you're looking for the combat to be the focal point, it quite clearly isn't.
Changes: So as this is an indie game, and technically in early release, there are quite a few things I would change: First, Some major rebalancing of item spawning. A whole section of the skill tree involves making potions and scrolls to enhance your character, however the majority of the resources later in the game do not spawn nearly frequently enough to warrant taking those skills in the first place. Second, the skill trees themselves need some rebalancing. At the moment, Only the foraging and blacksmith trees are worth taking, with a handful of currency just to get vaults. Everything else is so meh it makes me wonder why you'd want to grind out the other skill points. Third, as enemies are so throw away I can't really see much point other than being animated recourse nodes, perhaps make them a bit more challenging and engaging to deal with: Otherwise, just make them resource nodes, like a bone pile instead of a skeleton, and do away with enemies entirely. The endgame could be purely crafting based, making a spaceship to get off a purely broken island based world.
Recommendation: At the moment I would say this game is for your if you are into Minecraft like games, that are super chill and are all about casually getting resources to craft things to craft more things, so on and so forth. Also, the price is bound to go up in future, and a road map of new content and changes has already been released, with enemy improvements in the works, which is honestly the only real 'let down' of this game, as they feel out of place at this point in time.
Year: 2019 ESRB Rating: None (even checked with esrb.org)
Platform: PC Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie, Simulation
Story: While there isn't a story per-se, the general premise is that you are a dude stuck on an island and you have to forage the resources of the land around you to acquire enough currency to purchase other lands. By purchasing other lands you can acquire new resources to build even more things.The final goal is to unlock the island with the final boss lair and beat the final boss once you're geared up enough.
Characters: While the game has NPCs you can converse with, they're nothing more than quest givers, and while they have quirky personalities, they are virtually lifeless and unimportant. The player is a white silhouette of a male who doesn't speak, so there's not much life there either.
Graphics: The game's graphics are in homage to the old 2D pixel art days, like Zelda: Link to the Past. That said, the game does live to that era of pixel graphics: Decently fluid animations, shading / lighting effects, vivid color schemes for enemies, NPCs and resources alike. In a way, the white silhouette of the player makes him pop out so much it's impossible to lose sight of him in any landscape.
Audio: So this is a weird one: It has a blend of modern sounding music blended with traditional, old school adventure themes. The sound effects of the tools, enemies and NPCs are also modern sounding. However, nearly everything involving the player actions sounds 8-bit in nature, from walking around to taking damage. It's also a toss up whether an enemy sounds more modern, 32/64 bit sounding with his attacks / taking damage or whether it's 8-bit like the player. All in all it doesn't affect the play experience of the game, no sound, regardless of style, is off-putting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0f9Piy5zUI
The above link will take you a commentary-less video involving gameplay footage of the game.
@ 0:35 is the start of a decent walking sound effect duration, so you can really tell how 8-bit the walking animation sound effect is.
Level Design: The game is played in 3rd quarter top down, and as such the levels are flat, mostly square-ish islands with occasional holes in them. As far as the dungeons go, they are pretty linearly designed with hardly any deviance in terms of secrets rooms and the like. In the overworld there are only a few different island types (that I've unlocked so far), basic forest, desert and cursed earth, where the undead live. The sparse dungeons follow the same hierarchy in terms of color scheme and design as the island they're based on: lots of forest-y stuff in the forest levels, lots of purple and a decaying, crypt feeling for the undead islands, etc.
Controls: The vast majority of the game plays with the mouse, from selecting menu options, to selecting targets to interact with, either by harvesting or attacking them. It uses standard WASD movement for the player, and supports controllers, though I don't have one to test the fluidity of the buttons. There are a few options in the inventory screen to drop and sort items as well, nothing fancy.
Learning Curve: This game is easy and remains so. You start on an island with nothing but resources to harvest and no enemies, and spend a decent amount of time building infrastructure to support buying other cheap, nearby islands. Even after a handful of islands you only encounter slimes to fight, and they're as throw-away of a mob as the passive mobs, like chickens and cows, that you merely kill for resources. Even some of the later mobs, like autonomous turrets and fiery skulls and imps have a basic charge attack or occasionally fire an easily dodge-able laser. Even if you get hit you merely eat food that restores health, which you get merely by collecting other resources through easy to craft fish traps, and that's an instantaneous heal, so if you slap that food on your hot bar nothing should kill you while you learn the systems.
Fun Factor: So this game is clearly not for everyone. If you're looking for a chill, Minecraft-esc experience then you'll probably find this fun: The rush of gathering loads of resources to make stuffs to get even more resources, and so on and so forth. I personally find it fun, but that's really all it brings to the table, as if you're looking for the combat to be the focal point, it quite clearly isn't.
Changes: So as this is an indie game, and technically in early release, there are quite a few things I would change: First, Some major rebalancing of item spawning. A whole section of the skill tree involves making potions and scrolls to enhance your character, however the majority of the resources later in the game do not spawn nearly frequently enough to warrant taking those skills in the first place. Second, the skill trees themselves need some rebalancing. At the moment, Only the foraging and blacksmith trees are worth taking, with a handful of currency just to get vaults. Everything else is so meh it makes me wonder why you'd want to grind out the other skill points. Third, as enemies are so throw away I can't really see much point other than being animated recourse nodes, perhaps make them a bit more challenging and engaging to deal with: Otherwise, just make them resource nodes, like a bone pile instead of a skeleton, and do away with enemies entirely. The endgame could be purely crafting based, making a spaceship to get off a purely broken island based world.
Recommendation: At the moment I would say this game is for your if you are into Minecraft like games, that are super chill and are all about casually getting resources to craft things to craft more things, so on and so forth. Also, the price is bound to go up in future, and a road map of new content and changes has already been released, with enemy improvements in the works, which is honestly the only real 'let down' of this game, as they feel out of place at this point in time.
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