RE: What are you all playing right now?
January 4, 2023 at 8:37 am
(This post was last modified: January 4, 2023 at 8:40 am by emjay.)
Still playing Garden Paws, over eight hundred hours in now according to Steam. This is hands down the best game I've ever played and I can easily see myself getting another thousand hours or more out of it, there's just so much to do.
It's simply the most well balanced game I've ever played... in terms of the economy and resourcing. There's always something to save for and spend your money/resources on, even in the end game, and the price always feels just right. And there are so many ways to make that money and again your income is just as well balanced, so it's hard work but rewarding to make money in this game. As for the resourcing, it's a dream; many different resources you can gather or farm, but all interconnected and just the right amount of them so that it never gets tedious farming for them.
The other side of the game is the taming/raising animals aspect. It takes a long time in-game to tame/raise an animal - feeding it its favourite food for x days in a row - but once you have, it can drop resources for you to collect or do other things for you, such as collect from other animals... so that's where you can start automating the game and really growing your business empire. For instance raising chickens, they drop eggs, feathers, or poop, all of which you start having to pick up manually... but invest ten days taming a ferret in the wild, position it near your chicken coops, and it will collect and store the eggs and feathers of your chickens for later retrieval. Likewise, spend ten days taming a dung beetle, and it will pick up and store the poop, which you use to make fertiliser for farming etc.
Then there's the creative side of the game. It's a large and beautiful open world... an archipelago... where you can build anywhere or pretty much any thing. So just as you're gradually taming the wildlife in this game, and putting it to use for your benefit (or not... if you just want to pet them you can do that too... and name every animal if you want) you can likewise tame the wilderness as it were, for instance by building bridges between the islands. Or, my latest project underway, a massive hedge maze covering a lake. Etc.
Overall though what I love most about this game is it's incremental, multi-tasking feel... you've always got multiple goals on the go, long term and short term, so you never run out of stuff to do and always feel like you're making slow but steady progress toward your goals, and even when the hundreds of game quests run out, there's plenty to keep you going, for instance collections to complete as well as your own projects (such as that maze from before). So yeah, very highly recommend this game, and it's also very stable (on PC... it's also out on the Switch, but apparently much buggier).
It's simply the most well balanced game I've ever played... in terms of the economy and resourcing. There's always something to save for and spend your money/resources on, even in the end game, and the price always feels just right. And there are so many ways to make that money and again your income is just as well balanced, so it's hard work but rewarding to make money in this game. As for the resourcing, it's a dream; many different resources you can gather or farm, but all interconnected and just the right amount of them so that it never gets tedious farming for them.
The other side of the game is the taming/raising animals aspect. It takes a long time in-game to tame/raise an animal - feeding it its favourite food for x days in a row - but once you have, it can drop resources for you to collect or do other things for you, such as collect from other animals... so that's where you can start automating the game and really growing your business empire. For instance raising chickens, they drop eggs, feathers, or poop, all of which you start having to pick up manually... but invest ten days taming a ferret in the wild, position it near your chicken coops, and it will collect and store the eggs and feathers of your chickens for later retrieval. Likewise, spend ten days taming a dung beetle, and it will pick up and store the poop, which you use to make fertiliser for farming etc.
Then there's the creative side of the game. It's a large and beautiful open world... an archipelago... where you can build anywhere or pretty much any thing. So just as you're gradually taming the wildlife in this game, and putting it to use for your benefit (or not... if you just want to pet them you can do that too... and name every animal if you want) you can likewise tame the wilderness as it were, for instance by building bridges between the islands. Or, my latest project underway, a massive hedge maze covering a lake. Etc.
Overall though what I love most about this game is it's incremental, multi-tasking feel... you've always got multiple goals on the go, long term and short term, so you never run out of stuff to do and always feel like you're making slow but steady progress toward your goals, and even when the hundreds of game quests run out, there's plenty to keep you going, for instance collections to complete as well as your own projects (such as that maze from before). So yeah, very highly recommend this game, and it's also very stable (on PC... it's also out on the Switch, but apparently much buggier).