izigame.me

I went into this game thinking it'd be a breezy simplified take on Stardew Valley. What I found was a game with a wheelbarrow of fresh ideas within its genre and enough polished content to rival Stardew Valley at release. Nothing in this game feels tacked on.
tldr; Roots of Pacha is very good. Its a game that starts out small, but masterfully unveils itself to be one of the most well thought out games in it's genre.
+ Ranching is a full discipline in it's own right with animal husbandry, stats, rarity in appearance, and racing.
+ Cooking requires almost no investment to start, which lets it be a more important part of your play throughout the game. It'll still take a lot of investment if you want to be able to do everything, but the flexibility means almost every recipe is worth keeping in mind, rather than just the 1-3 most powerful ones.
+ Farming in this game has a completely different flow to other farming games. You cannot buy seeds and there are no sprinklers. You have to forage for seeds from wild crops each season, turning the first few days of each season into an almost easter egg hunt. Later in the game you'll have other ways to water crops and get seeds, but their implementation is immaculately tied to your efforts from earlier years. I have never played a farming game that made me so eager to find and plant as many of every plant my stamina can manage.
+ Artisan goods can be made as well, and though mostly it's just a way to make crops worth more money, the different mechanics of each crafting station, and the existence of multi stage crafting systems for the most valuable types of artisan good is my new gold standard.
+ Mining did not copy Stardew Valley's homework. There isn't much I want to say about it other than appreciating that they didn't feel the need to add combat and monsters to it. Mining with combat is fine, but without it they can focus on the exploration and puzzle solving aspect to it, which is a breath of fresh air.
+/- Relationships are maybe the one area where I feel not enough is done. Living in a close knit community like this I find it strange that there aren't more ways to feel connected to that community. Seasonal festivals are nice, and I love the ability to invite people to dance (Though with how long the animation is, it's not really worth doing with someone you're not trying to romance), but something like occasional celebrations around the fire, or small birthday parties would give the wider cast more opportunity to show off their honestly excellent character writing. Rainy/snowy days where almost everyone huddles up in a couple buildings feels like a gesture toward that, but still only serves as a chance to give a lot of gifts. Child rearing is a welcome addition and feels like it has the care and attention of the team, but your spouse has the same dead end problem almost all games with this kind of system fall into.
- My one negative is that it's not clear how valuable buffs actually are. They have a number associated, and a tooltip explaining what exactly each buff means, but not how the number is actually applied. For walking speed it seems like its #% movement speed increase, which makes food that gives walking speed 1 feel more like a joke than an actual benefit. For how short these buffs last, and with a buff that just increases how long other buffs last, it seems weird to me that they don't feel all that impactful. The accessory system is a really interesting alternative to having just regular skill progression, and I wanted to believe it was worth investing the massive amounts of time and resources, changing them out as my goals shifted, but until the very end it was hard to see any real effect.