I loved a lot of this game, it's really cute, and the mechanics are fun, if a little challenging at times. But there is one massive problem I have with it, that has honestly ultimately put me off of it. My daughter grew up, and that was great, but then out of the blue I got a notification in the mail that she was engaged. To her uncle, her other parent's brother. And there was nothing I could do about it, there was no possible way to stop it, or turn it off.

I loved this game and I am rather sad I finished it. The game play is customizable to the experience you want. I personally disabled the decay because I enjoy hoarding items. I loved how you can build your family through generations. I hope they add more content! It is a very unique and charming game.

I really wanted to like this game, but after playing for a while I felt like I had to take a step back and stop. I enjoyed myself for the first few seasons, but there were a couple things that I started noticing that hampered my enjoyment.

Gonna start with the things that I genuinely really like about this game because it does have a lot going for it. First off, the art style. It's really cute and reminds me of Paper Mario in the best way (which I think might be intentional given how close the two art styles are). Everyone looks great and I enjoy walking around town because it looks amazing. I also really like the level of customization that you have available to you, as one of my favorite things to do in game was run to the tailor and see what stuff I could get to customize my character. I also reaaaaaaaally appreciate things not being gender locked, one of my least favorite things is having things locked because I didn't decide to play a particular gender character, and having everything be the same regardless of my character's gender was something I really appreciated. I also like how the town always feels like its changing, whether that be through characters dying or being born, or travelers coming in for the town fair. That's all I can think of for now but I do think there's a lot more that's good about this game, but now I'm gonna discuss my main issues with the game.

First of all, I do want to clarify that having the possibility of your fellow town members dying is genuinely really cool. That being said, within the first in game week my entire town caught a disease and the vast majority of them died. The first funeral you go to is really impactful, but then it loses almost all meaning once you have one quite literally every day for several weeks (I think I had like, 10+ in a row at LEAST). Also, all of the carpenters died so I couldn't get any buildings for several days which really sucked (There was a replacement carpenter to replace the starting ones but she also died lol). The death thing is really neat but it just happens way too often to feel impactful, diseases are insane and if one pops up say goodbye to literally everyone you know because barely anyone is surviving that unless you intervene (which wasn't a thing to my knowledge when this happened).

Another issue I had is that you don't have many options for how to spend your time each day. After you water all your crops, you're pretty much limited to fishing, talking to NPCs, or going around clicking every interactable item on the map to get more materials. It's fun at first but quickly gets pretty boring (I'm at winter right now). Maybe it's because I tend to play games for really extended periods of time (like several hours at a time) and I got burned out, but I do feel like I'm doing the same exact thing over and over again. Additionally, all the things to do feel really similar to each other, so I feel like all I'm doing is running around the map collecting stuff, going to bed, then repeating. Just feels like busywork, and I know farming sim games are just kinda like that sometimes but this is the only game so far in the genre where I've felt this issue, and I think it's just due to the lack of variety of activities to fill in the time, they all feel really similar to each other.

Also, I think the final thing is that crops feel really unbalanced. I know this is a casual game, but the multi-harvest plants are so much better than anything else that it feels unfair. From my experience, every crop sells for the same amount, but some of them can get harvested multiple times AND give more than one crop every harvest, while some can only be harvested once and give you one crop. Maybe this got changed since I stopped playing but I was looking through the patch notes and I didn't see anything. Just felt pointless to buy 90% of the seeds when there was a very clear best option. The literal only reason I would plant some of these is if I were trying to make a specific recipe which just doesn't feel good to me.

All that being said, I do think this game is fun for the first several hours. I think the primary issue is that the game doesn't feel like it evolves ever. I got married and had kids but it felt like nothing really changed. Everyone takes ages to grow up even when you set the growth speed to fast and I just felt like all I was doing was waiting for everyone to grow older instead of feeling like I'm making progress. I think if you're not going to play this for very long, it's a good time, but I struggled to want to play this game long term.