A quick video game review
May. 6th, 2023 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetCozy Grove - You play a Spirit Scout, an activity scout type person who communes with the spirits of the dead; you are stuck on an island with what will eventually be seventeen ghosts.
Lovely story, very pretty art, not very visually accessible. All of the art is very "drawn" as opposed to pixelated, and while it's beautiful, well. There are a lot of "gathering" quests. Like, a lot. It's most of what you have to do. And the things you gather don't stand out very well against the background. The game will give you hints about where the missing items are, but the hints aren't always very clear, and there are sometimes multiple locations that the hints could be referring to. There is one workaround built into this: You can pay the park ranger 100 coins to give you directions to whatever item you're looking for. This is a bit of a pinch at the beginning of the game, before you have a lot of coins saved up, but you also don't deal with more than three or four ghosts to start out with, so there aren't very many quests.
This also wouldn't be too bad, but there are items you need to "harvest" throughout the course of gameplay, including some renewing resources. And, as far as I can tell, if you didn't personally put that resource where it is? It doesn't stay there. There is one tree this is an exception for. One. There are up to three other trees and six rocks to potentially mine from that change their location regularly. The trees change daily, while I think the rocks change monthly, so you have enough time to get used to where they are before they move around and you have to find them again.
There's a story reason for this! It's explained in-game! The scenery around the ghosts changes every day as well! But I've only ever had a quest I was unable to complete because the in-game scenery didn't match the quest requirements once, and there are A Lot of quests to complete before you beat the game.
There's also an option to have perpetual daylight in the game, as opposed to a day/night cycle, which is the only other sop to visual accessibility I'm aware of. The nighttime graphics are lovely, very evocative, but I found myself mostly playing on daylight for better visibility.
In terms of story, a nice game. Lovely art, too, and soothing music. In terms of accessibility: If you have trouble with "find the missing items" games, maybe give this one a miss.
I also had some trouble that may have been Switch-specific, since that's the platform I was playing on. I'm guessing it's also available for computer? Anyway, I had difficulty selecting specific items from time to time, and I think being able to click on them with a mouse would be a lot easier. The load times were also terrible, and the auto-save feature had a tendency to make my game micro-freeze, whereas manual saving would occasionally stall out the game completely and kick me back to the title screen.
Lovely story, very pretty art, not very visually accessible. All of the art is very "drawn" as opposed to pixelated, and while it's beautiful, well. There are a lot of "gathering" quests. Like, a lot. It's most of what you have to do. And the things you gather don't stand out very well against the background. The game will give you hints about where the missing items are, but the hints aren't always very clear, and there are sometimes multiple locations that the hints could be referring to. There is one workaround built into this: You can pay the park ranger 100 coins to give you directions to whatever item you're looking for. This is a bit of a pinch at the beginning of the game, before you have a lot of coins saved up, but you also don't deal with more than three or four ghosts to start out with, so there aren't very many quests.
This also wouldn't be too bad, but there are items you need to "harvest" throughout the course of gameplay, including some renewing resources. And, as far as I can tell, if you didn't personally put that resource where it is? It doesn't stay there. There is one tree this is an exception for. One. There are up to three other trees and six rocks to potentially mine from that change their location regularly. The trees change daily, while I think the rocks change monthly, so you have enough time to get used to where they are before they move around and you have to find them again.
There's a story reason for this! It's explained in-game! The scenery around the ghosts changes every day as well! But I've only ever had a quest I was unable to complete because the in-game scenery didn't match the quest requirements once, and there are A Lot of quests to complete before you beat the game.
There's also an option to have perpetual daylight in the game, as opposed to a day/night cycle, which is the only other sop to visual accessibility I'm aware of. The nighttime graphics are lovely, very evocative, but I found myself mostly playing on daylight for better visibility.
In terms of story, a nice game. Lovely art, too, and soothing music. In terms of accessibility: If you have trouble with "find the missing items" games, maybe give this one a miss.
I also had some trouble that may have been Switch-specific, since that's the platform I was playing on. I'm guessing it's also available for computer? Anyway, I had difficulty selecting specific items from time to time, and I think being able to click on them with a mouse would be a lot easier. The load times were also terrible, and the auto-save feature had a tendency to make my game micro-freeze, whereas manual saving would occasionally stall out the game completely and kick me back to the title screen.
