Pine is not a bad game. Pine is an ok game with good ideas and bad execution. Let me explain.

You start off as a rando human guy whose tribe ends up needing to look for a more stable home, so he sets out into the world to explore. You can wander wherever you like, picking up crafting materials and food and finding treasures, crafting recipes, and civilization. You quickly discover the island you're on has 5 main non-human tribes living on it, the moose, crocodiles, foxes, birds, and frog peoples (plus the neutral otter-weasel-raccoon-things). At first these tribes don't like each other and they don't like you, but you can increase your reputation by gifting them items. Certain items give better rep boosts than others, and once you achieve different reputation levels the members of that species no longer attack you on sight, and you unlock favorable benefits like being able to trade with them, upgrade their villages, or leading their villages on raids of other tribes to expand their territory. The main story quest takes you around the island to various vaults which serve as the big Zelda-ish dungeons of the game filled with puzzles where you get your big artifacts that unlock new abilities for your character.

Now all that sounds great! But the execution is absolutely botched in almost every facet. A normal player of this kind of game will want to become friendly with every tribe in the game, hoping to unlock quests with them and some such. Maybe they'll ignore the tribe they don't like or try to take out the one they like to hate. Unfortunately that's not how this game operates. See, when you give items to one tribe, multiple other tribes don't like that, and your reputation actually goes down with them while you attempt to build it up with another. So you basically can only be friendly with one tribe at a time, as the rep with other tribes plunges into hated territory. Every time you build rep you end up losing more in total. It feels TERRIBLE. Worse, there's never really any point to building reputation anyways. Outside of story quests where you have to be on favorable terms with a certain tribe for that specific moment, there's little benefits in allying with anyone. The story doesn't change based on which tribes you favor, and even worse than that - sometimes story events will destroy your gained reputation anyways with certain tribes! Favor the birds? Well there's no point in helping them conquer the north side of the map because the moment you leave, their villages fall to pieces. Crafted a bunch of efficiency plans to help them upgrade the town? The moment you start the next quest all those upgrades you spent your materials on vanish. Why even bother? Why have all the different tribes if you won't let the player choose their favorites or let them actually build up SOMETHING over the course of the game? There aren't even any faction specific sidequests. There's faction specific armor and weapon recipes, but they're of middling quality and vastly outclassed by the armor you get from exploration.

The main vaults are well crafted for the most part, both in mechanics and story. The dungeons and puzzles are the high point of the game, but even there problems arise. There's....how should I say...some very poor implementation of the level design in the game. Inside the dungeons is mostly fine, but the devs didn't seem to really test out the limits of the abilities they gave the main character. Certain puzzles can be trivialized simply by making jumps the devs clearly didn't think you would be able to make. Some puzzles can be bricked by jumping into a place you can't get back from, requiring a game load. If you've played Skyrim you probably know what I mean here, but they also didn't really calibrate your ability to climb the global terrain like mountain slopes while they clearly intended it to limit where you can move. One puzzle outdoors wanted you to climb up this mechanical tower that had timed electrified pads and switches to change the alignments and so on.....I simply bunny hopped my way up the cliff face next to the tower and jumped straight onto the top. That kind of thing abounds throughout the game, if it's not just buggy. One puzzle had a horse creature you needed trapped inside a stable and you had to solve a puzzle to open the gate. Well, I just jumped onto the horse and it was able to ride through the gate like it wasn't even there. You get trapped on or inside terrain CONSTANTLY too, and if you can't roll or spam jump your way out of it you have to save/load in place. There's some pretty massive texture pop in going on with the grass too, and it looks really really bad. Lots of characters look and feel floaty, like they aren't anchored to the ground. I will have to say though the character models themselves look great. Most of the animations look nice too.

Probably the worst part of the game is its combat, and unfortunately you have to do it a bunch. It's clunky beyond belief and you avoid it whenever possible. You have your choice of bow with decent aiming controls but arrows are a consumable you have to craft, or sword and shield. The sword has the slow heavy attack combo, the quick weak combo, and the medium speed.....medium combo. All have extremely poor hitboxes on the attacks and faulty swing tracking, leaving you swinging at air more than half the time, even when locked onto an enemy. The lock on is sketchy as well, often locking onto friendly units when you NEVER want to do that. Your character handles sluggishly roo - it's clunky to evade out of the middle of a combo, the evade is extremely short distance to begin with, and certain types of enemies have tracking attacks to begin with. Friendly fire is rampant (from both the foxes and frogs) despite the game trying to claim on loading screens that friendly fire shouldn't happen.

One thing that is massively absent from this type of game that I find unforgivable (an explore-gather-craftandtrade type affair) is a BANK. Your inventory starts way too small, although you can upgrade it to a good size. But you still lack a bank so you are constantly fighting your inventory the entire game. Players will naturally want to hoard the materials they're constantly picking up, but the game seems to want to punish you instead.

The music is very nice! High points are the peaceful type tracks while you roam the countryside and I quite enjoyed them.

In the end - they had a lot of good ideas, and they tried. You can definitely see how things could have been better if they had a larger budget and a bigger team to implement the things that didn't quite work out. Still you can definitely get enjoyment out of the game if you accept its limitations - just make sure you get it on sale for half price or less.