While the Iron’s Hot Review (Mrwillgum)
While the Iron's hot is a weird experience. The premise of the game is that you, a journeyman blacksmith who doesn't start the game knowing how to blacksmith anything, travel to a legendary blacksmithing town only to discover it's been abandoned, you set out to rebuild this town, and you do this by traveling all around the archipelago blacksmithing, rarely ever returning to your new home. Progression feels incidental and unintentional you level up by playing the game, and then get a choice between 3 random stat boosts most of which feel like they lack impact on the game.
You can upgrade buildings at your home base, and have to at certain times but you're only there for the first hour or so so this doesn't feel helpful, you can also upgrade your blacksmithing cart which is a lot more impactful but you can only do it after certain quests. The game also expects you to search the whole map for stuff and if you don't you can miss things and end up not being able to upgrade your cart because you need a compass recipe in your inventory in order to get the paper needed to turn your cart into a boat but if you never found that you don't get the paper and don't know what the fuck to do. The game also doesn't want you searching everything everywhere all the time because you can accidentally talk to and save the Ox before you're supposed to and then have a homeless Ox roam your town until you progress enough with the story to be able to build them the home you were supposed to build first.
If you know how a to configure a tools recipe without having the recipe itself you can build it some times but not always and it's never clear when you can or can't nor is it clear if this is intentional or a bug. You can also make endless ingots by, making a plate, then smelting that plate back down to ingots but also use the bellows which lets you double your output and speed. Meaning you can theoretically make 1000+ ingots out of 1.
If you log of the game without returning to town or your cart you start in a makeshift camp thing and they don't tell you this so I thought my game bugged so hard it propelled me to the end game of the story. With games like stardew or Valheim, you start with copper and work your way up through different metals, here you start with iron, except that the iron tools are colored like copper ones and the next metal advancement is steel which you mine in mines and that isn't how steel works. Steel is an alloy meaning it's made up of multiple metals mixed together. It's an annoying little change in the formula that serves no purpose other than to annoy me.
There is no characterization so the world feels hollow, you can only interact with someone if they want you to interact with them otherwise you'll never speak to them. There is no map. Money is too easy to obtain and has little depth. You can't just make items and sell them because why would you be able to do that as a blacksmith. There are set pieces all over the map you can interact with but as per usual there is little reason to.
There is this never ending sense of confusion throughout the game as you progress like you're doing way better or way worse than you actually are because nothing is being explained and you don't know what to think anymore. Towns with Job boards have like 10 people in them who haven't had any form of a blacksmith in years and they ask for the same like 5 items endlessly with no logic as to why, it feels like you never actually achieve anything when Fran has asked for the same axe 20 times.
This game is a mess, it's a mess with charm and has some interesting aspects but it's mess never the less. I can't recommend this game at full price 10$ or less sure but 20$ is way too much for a game with this little focus or vision. If you told me this game was made by an AI I would believe you.