izigame.me

It really hasn't changed all that much from its Early Access period. Someone very stupid once told me it was a game where "you could be and do anything", but lo and behold, this very stupid, very simple man was wrong.
I do have 160+ hours in the game. I try to put in a good 50+ hours before I make up my mind about something, and I did this multiple times in EA as well as after 1.0 release.
Shops
The general shop is OK because you can sell whatever you want. I did have some fun selling baked goods and pretending to be a baker. Until I got over how utterly tedious it is to restock your shop with new baked goods and just started selling ingredients instead.
All the shops are like this. Tedious. Boring. Samey. Zero customization, zero drama, zero difficulty.
Romance
Once you're done the prologue, you're aged up to 18 or so. For plot purposes, the game has taken away your family and now you're all alone. If you don't want to be alone, which is one of the presumed purposes of this game, you must find a partner. Well, I was a year older than two of the "eligible" bachelors (they were 17, I think), so they weren't valid partners. There was actually no one within my age range unless I wanted to wait a year (and why would I do that if the point of the game is to have family and mine was taken away?), so I settled on John Bows, a man who was a decade my senior. It kinda squicked me out a little bit, but whatever, it's a game.
So I started dating John Bows. I took him on dates, to his preferred location, and upon arriving, he screamed, "MORE!!" and then I had a new quest to go somewhere else. That is 100% of all dates. "MORE!!" until it's over. There's nothing interesting. You're not revealed anything special about their character. You don't even get to know them. Just "MORE!!!" and then it ends. When he screams "MORE!!!" I picture a fat medieval lord like Robert Baratheon gobbling down a fatty turkey leg, covered in turkey grease. It's just gross.
When I eventually got to the point where we could marry, I had to do a ridiculous multi-part fetch quest. Get this, get that, get this other thing but only on a specific date. Propose on a specific date. If you accidentally miss it because you were restocking your boring shop, oh, well, too bad, you have to wait another week. The game doesn't pop up and tell you it's a specific date, you have to keep track on that in your head, by reading your calendar and simultaneously opening up a book on the "agreed upon ways of marriage" and following the instructions step by step.
Once you're married, your partner gives up what little personality they had and moves in with you. They don't interact with you, don't interact with your children. They have zero personality, not that they really had any to begin with.
Family
Probably the most interesting and personable characters in the game is Uncle Bill, with the exception of old man Jakob (and let's be real, Jakob's only nice to you so you don't choose him to sacrifice). Uncle Bill is one of the only characters in the game that's nice to you off the bat. Uncle Bill's story was more interesting when he adopted you and forced you to call him Father in the very early version of the game.
Your sibling is a forking jerk. From the moment they wake you up to start the game, to when they abandon you after you were kidnapped for five years by an extradimensional monster rabbit. At the end of the prologue, he (it was a he for me, for you it may be a she) tells you Uncle Bill's dead and then berates you in what would be a moment of sadness. Then he just forks right off and sends you salty letters every once in awhile.. Granted, your relationship improves and he agrees to meet up after a year or so has passed, but at this point as a player I'm annoyed. Your sibling should stick around and help you. They should be your family.
Farming
You cannot place furniture, rearrange it, or decorate anything on your farm. There's zero customization. All the set is already designed and there's just a few spots where you can interact (your kitchen, your family chore board, your bed).
You are given the ability to feed your pets various items they like - which you judge namely by watching their reaction bubbles, where meaningless hieroglyphs appear above them and you're meant to discern their meaning through your intuition. You can feed them gassy apples and then pop them, giving at most a couple ingredients, but then you have no pet. You can buy new ones from the sales auction, and at this point from your crappy shops you probably have a lot of disposable income so it's a viable form of ingredient farming. But your animals do not breed, and have very little in the way of interaction. There are also no horses - which I love horses in games, but every game does them dirty, and I guess PixelCount wasn't sure they could do horses well either as they've made them "extinct" in Kynseed's lore.
To sum up, animals are for the following: wasting ingredients to feed them, popping into very few ingredients, or riding. There's no animal husbandry mechanic to be had here.
As for farming crops, crops can be placed in a few static areas. If you are unmarried, you have to water them yourself or they won't grow (unless it's raining). There's zero new mechanics with crops, and like many farming life sims, crops are boring, although they get extra points for being boring as you can't even choose where they go.
There are herbs that you need for certain recipes. You can actually only access these items after the prologue - even though you'd probably like to make several of the recipes you already have access to, you are actually really limited. Many of these herbs do not grow on your farm, though there are a few that do, as they have static growing areas. They are even less dynamic than the other crops.
Overall
Ultimately this game isn't about family. I guess it isn't about romance. Or farming. Or owning/running shops. Or exploration. Or going through the weird forests with weird combat mechanics (it's almost as if they didn't want to add combat but shoehorned it in somehow to appease those players that need combat in every game they play).
While the game does have interesting, "tactile" minigames, an interesting art style, and an interesting lore, it also suffers from extreme lifelessness. There's little to do and it can be easily be completed well on in the beginning of your life. The generational mechanic is worthless because there's never a reason to play that long. The humour tries too hard and likely would appeal more to a juvenile audience.
So what's this game about? Nothing, really. There's no purpose to anything. It should be about your LEGACY but it falls very, very short. It's lifeless, shallow, and once the art style has lost its novelty and lustre, there's nothing to keep you around.
I really wanted to like this game, I really wanted to play the game that the Devs wanted to make. But they didn't make that game.