izigame.me

The protagonist wishes to visit her grandfather on a WALL-E-esque, trash-filled Earth. Upon arriving at his farm, she discovers he’s missing and decides to maintain his farm while simultaneously investigating into his disappearance.
Info
• No character customization.
• Gameplay involves: clearing trash, combat, farming, crafting, cooking, animal caretaking, collecting, quests, solving puzzles, and exploring.
• Combat is extremely simple. You just whack enemy robots with the character’s drill until their HP is gone. Avoid their targeted attacks and have healing food if you do get hit. There are also recipes for “super chickens” which are basically bombs. If you get defeated, it’s implied the protagonist retreated and rested for the remainder of the day, and she’ll wake up inside the house.
• The game is automatically saved when using the bed to sleep at night, but the player can also save manually anytime.
• No romance.
• No fishing currently, but the devs claim they’re working on adding that to the game later on.
Praises
• Lots of exploring and hidden places to find.
• Clearing trash is oddly satisfying.
• Super chickens (bombs) are fun to use, both on enemies and trash.
• Lots of cute animals and robots. They can wear hats, which is probably to compensate for no character customization.
• Cute illustrations for loading screens.
• Cute posters to put up in the house for accomplishing certain milestones.
• Amusing references.
• Very obvious implied messages of environmentalism, given the setting.
Complaints/Bug Reports
• Several typos.
• Graphics integrity issues. I don’t really care about seeing through walls or inside of objects, but a lot of times when the ground is uneven (as in, not perfectly flat), the protagonist gets stuck on absolutely nothing. It’ll be as though an impassable object is there, but there’s nothing there, the ground is just not mapped correctly.
• Enemy robots can attack through walls and solid piles of trash. They can also run through trash or into graphics to get away.
• Chickens get stuck behind the coop a lot. Happens less with an upgraded coop.
• Names disappear from animals if you name them before they reach their shelter on the farm.
• You can’t place buildings or machines on the farm if animals are in the way, and they get in the way a lot. There’s no way to move animals either.
• Flowers are weird and pointless. The only flower I’ve ever gotten to actually produce flowers is the sunflower. Every other flower just gives seeds when grown. So you end up with a bunch of seeds … for no reason. I tried planting them in the upgraded planting field but that just gave me seeds too. If there is a way to make them grow actual flowers, the game does not even remotely make it clear how.
• The robotic llamas seem glitched on the farm, because the ones in the desert give you resources, but the ones on the farm never gave anything. Also, if the ones in the desert have items on their backs, you can’t get the item. There’s no prompt to. I was only able to get the items once they’re on the ground.
• Getting items from a raccoon counts toward the achievement for getting items from boars. I got the first achievement for getting 5 items from boars even though I had never visited the boars yet, and got it while getting something from the raccoon on my farm.
• In the Lonely Hills: Old Quarry area, there’s a duck in a cage that can’t be rescued because it doesn’t have a prompt to.
• Given how many eggs and truffles the player ends up with due to the abundance of chickens/ducks and pigs to bring to the farm, I feel like they should stack higher than just 10 per slot.
• Not much of a story. It’s there, but it’s mostly an excuse to give the player tasks. It isn’t developed at all.
• Story continuity not always upheld from sidequest to sidequest.
• The lake holes in the desert should really have a much bigger hit box. I wasted a a few in-game days trying to fill the first one only to find out on the discussion board that the hit box is tricky to find and it should only take 1/3rd or so of the water tank, not several entire tanks, like I ended up doing. The first one (as in, the one in the same area with the fennec habitat) is definitely the worst; circled around it dozens upon dozens of times trying to trigger the water filling. Ended up having to watch a YouTube video to see precisely where to stand and what angle to have the hose at.
• On May 10, 2023, they released an update that included new items for the game. Unfortunately, the dark wallpaper I got for the house caused the game to perpetually load when trying to re-enter. Had to manually force the game to shut down and lost an in-game day’s worth of time.
• The ending is silly and a bit anticlimactic.
This is another example of an unfinished game being released on Steam as though it’s complete, tested, and polished. This game should be in Early Access for all the issues it still has. Yes, it’s possible to get through the game and get the achievements for it, but will it be fun for most people? I had some fun, sure, but I also had way too many frustrations.
Maybe if I had played this game a year in the future when it (hopefully) would be actually complete and fixed, I’d have liked it enough to give it a positive review.
If you’re interested in this game, I definitely say wait for several updates. Like I said, I did have some fun. If it weren’t for the frequent frustrations in the game, I’d have been like “Yeah, it’s a decent farming sim.” So, there are probably plenty of people who would still like this game. And I don’t know, maybe people with more patience than me could like it right now.