izigame.me

The premise piqued my interest, but the execution feels pretty off. For starters, the prologue drags on for way too long. For a game that advertises itself as "a vast world filled with adventure, creativity, and meaningful choices", I feel the prologue actively undermines this description. You're basically trapped in a small section of the map for two in-game weeks, while also being forced to work within a specific time frame during the days. Specifically, this time frame is 6am to 11pm. At first, it's easy to put up with; just explore the game's systems and get to know the NPCs that dot the landscape for two weeks, right? Not quite. Because your character is a literal child during the prologue, there's a bunch of systems you can't make use of until those two weeks tick down. You're pretty much stuck doing whatever task Uncle Ineptitude has set for you that day, and whatever meager tasks you gather from the noticeboard in town and from NPCs.
As far as the actual requests go, they're pretty straightforward. Do the thing, get thing. What slaps my hog, however, is how the story tasks are handled, and how time sensitive tasks from NPCs are handled during the prologue. More on that last bit later. DIY Daddy will only give you one primary task for the day, acting as a tutorial for that particular system, which would be fine if it was an actual, meaningful story segment with an in depth system to interact with to get you used to the myriad of crafting mini-games, and introduce you to these NPCs your adoptive Uncle has an established relationship with. Instead, what it boils down to is your baby ass wandering into town, getting told to do the thing, stumbling through the thing, and then killing time by conversing with the cast of NPCs in town, then quickly realizing the pool of dialogue they pull from is extremely limited and dare I say soulless. It feels especially soulless to interact with the ones that are literally related to your character. Your twin brother/sister is actually just named, "Sibling". I can name myself at the beginning of the game, why can't I name my counterpart? It just makes me feel no meaningful connection to them. Plus, the dialogue of the NPCs themselves, limited as it is, is also a strange grab bag of really bad puns(and not the Dad joke kind, the item descriptions are way better for that) and oddly stilted or literal sentences. Seriously, it's things along the lines of, "I am going to eat food now because I am hungry." Either Uncle has been hitting the bottle, or homeboy is actually a martian, and both of these sound plausible to me at this point.
...Anyway, going back to the tasks.
Since these tasks are structured as "one new thing a day", you'll find yourself sprinting back to the village to complete a one minute task every day. This really should've been compressed down to a day or two max. For instance, you get sent there to buy a tin bucket. Don't get me started on the wooden bucket you find on day one, it's unusable for anything you would use a wooden bucket for in real life. I guess water in a wooden bucket is a deadly sin or something. Anyway, Unc gives you the paper, you buy the bucket, and then you hurry up and wait. The next day, you go buy seeds in the same damn town. This is explained in-game as, "Oh, they only sell seeds at the market on this day", which would be fine if the previous day didn't have a trader that also sells seeds, sitting two feet outside of the store you buy the bucket from. The following day, you go back to replace a rusty sickle, at a shop that's open every day. You walk out back, smack a rock, turn it into a sickle, then kill time. I cannot stress enough how inane and tedious this feels. The time of day progresses at a breakneck pace, but you finish the tasks so fast it outpaces even that.
But what do you do to kill time after your primary task? You could explore the nearby areas, but again, the area itself is very small and restrictive, so by day five you'll have combed through the whole thing. It basically turns into remembering which farms let you steal their things by default, because that's more lucrative then picking up "Cook my dinner for the 69th time today" from whatever random NPC decides they want a dish made by a child whose recipe list consists of jam, jam but blue, and vegan soup. And very frequently, they'll choose a dish you don't even have the recipe or means to get the recipe for. And even when you do get a cooking task you can complete, it has to be delivered in a specific time frame. That doesn't sound bad, until you realize you don't get a clock. For some inexplicable reason, someone decided the official way to tell time was picking dandelions with 12 seeds on them, each representing one hour on an analog clock. The problem is not being able to know exactly what time you picked the thing, so that first seed that fell off could be 7am, or it could be 10am, or it could have just fallen off due to the vibrations caused by bashing your head against a wall. This is stupid, and I hate it.
I wish I could say it was one big core issue that made me stop playing, but realistically, It's the constant deluge of small things constantly getting in the way and dragging down the pacing. Sure, the game beyond the prologue could be great, but I don't want to wait for the game to become fun; that's like being required to stare at cardboard for thirty minutes before getting to watch five minutes of your favorite TV show or movie.
I will say though, the environments kick ass. The game is a nice piece of pixel art to wander around and look at, NPCs not withstanding. Though the area is very limited in size, the density and variety of effects and weather on display are top notch; the ambiance in the caves is also appropriately oppressive, with notes from explorers long past detailing panicked accounts of unseen entities knocking on the walls, following right behind them just out of sight. And also blacksmith mini-game is pretty good too.
I think given a few updates and tweaks, a lot of the early game slog can be ironed out; reading back on what I've written makes it sound like I hated the game and wanted to punch holes in the wall, but honestly I was just disappointed. At the very least, I absolutely respect that the game released in a stable state, unlike a lot, and I mean A LOT of game releases these days.