Dawnfolk Review (Ambassador of Benevolence)
I beat story mode on hard. It's a very dull story. It's hard to convey how dull it is. Imagine if Clippy wrote a fantasy novel on a 2005-era cell phone. I kept wondering why there was a story at all.
The game is full of simple minigames. Want to harvest berries? You get 8-11 food. You always get 8, but you can catch up to 3 extra in a jar in a minigame. Since you'll always catch 3 berries, it takes a lot of extra time for no change in outcome. I kept expecting the mini-games to develop, like that you'd sometimes find a treasure chest, or would have to avoid poison berries, or would get so hard you'd struggle -- but there's nothing like that. It's just not a developed idea in this game, and takes up maybe 1/3 (!) of the playtime, which I didn't appreciate at all.
There are some balancing issues. It's easy to abuse the Witch's Hut, and very tedious. For some reason the trader's prices go up as you trade, but the price of the witch's potion never goes up. I hope this gets changed, it distracts from actually using the game systems.
There are some quality of life things I'd like to see improved. The upgrade system isn't intuitive. (Houses have 4 upgrade options, but other buildings have none, and it's not visually clear which is which. And there's no metaprogression or tooltips to introduce any upgrade options.) There's no notification of when wolves spawn. It's hard to see what's under the evil mist. It's not clear what destroying the evil obelisks does. I found the default controls awkward and didn't like them.
One of the store page tags this game as a roguelite, but it's not. There's a story mode, a puzzle mode I didn't try, daily challenge, and an endless mode that didn't seem random.
Overall, it didn't feel like a gentle game. It felt bad to chop down forests, kill all the animals, ship food to the capital, build churches, fill wilderness with pastures, make trade deals with the elves as you settle their forest. This cutesy imperialism wasn't any kind of escapism for me. I felt like the story was playing with the flame narrator having self-realization of his nature as fire being bad, but I wasn't sure what was intended by the end of it. It just felt off.
Mainly, all the dialogue, mini-games, music, and enemy cycles just felt tedious, and obscured what I had hoped to be a pleasant synergy/efficiency roguelite game. You may enjoy it, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it over other grid games.