Recent reviews by Salted Caramel Fox

best game of the decade, both boobies and monster slaying, what's not to love 10/10

Best shooter of the decade, what else is there to say. Great balance, superb gunplay, beautifully smooth fluid and skillfull movement that runs at a buttery fps on a medicore rig. What an absolute gem, only game I'll ever buy cosmetics for 10/10

Absolute mess of a game, can't even make it past the first hour due to the multitude of bugs blocking the mines. This is why it's important to focus on your primary gameplay loops, because half the mechanics could be taken out for streamlining and the game would be vastly improved. It tried to be too much with too little and I don't see any number of updates fixing that. What a shame.

10/10

What a woeful experience. Been playing since Forsaken and I was never 'hooked' but it kept me interested enough until Season of Undying killed any passion I had for the game.

What's the point of having to pay for a second job. Because that what it feels like.

Hours of grind for pitiful rewards, terrible payment model of having to fork over $40 for a new season every 3 months or so, and then having to buy the season pass too, which is another $10 and add on that the borderline criminal cosmetic microtransaction Eververse shop.

I don't have fun grinding, and I don't have fun achieving rewards, play literally anything else instead, Warframe, Dark Souls, CoD, etc. This game is a soul-less empty husk and no one is more disappointed about that than me.

Some of the most beautiful pixel art I've seen, intriguing setting, can't wait to see it all fleshed out and hopefully the good, although slightly jarring dialog, gets smoothed out to the point where it doesn't feel like characters are reacting nonsensically. Super solid and it's got me hyped for the full game.

If you enjoyed Stardew Valley, then this will scratch the same itch, with a beautiful artstyle, structured curve giving actual meaning and tangible progress, and music I could listen to forever, this game is everything I had hoped and wanted it to be.

I've seen a lot of criticism of the micro-crafting and how sometimes it can feel padded (for example if you want to make fetilizer, you need to go down the entire alchemy tree, making it feel like a simple task dissapears down the rabbit hole), however the fact that, when you get the infrustructure in place in future it's way easier to craft in the future made it feel worthwhile for me at least.

Now the rest of this goes out to the game devs, if any are reading this; Firstly congratulations, you've made a great game with what I can tell is an enormous amount of potential, I hope you keep it up, and would like to provide some ideas I've considered while playing.

I like the graveyard/corpse mechanic as it inscentivises both the corpse care and then the decoration however I wish it were possible to exhume a corpse without having to remove the headstone and fence as it slows down improving and feels like needless busywork. I've noticed it also seems ot be buggy sometimes with grave rankings not being what they should. I also think it would be nice to be able to have more graveyard decal options like the lamps, such as being able to put up statues rather than having them exlcusively require a grave. I wish there was more that was done with this as it's a great idea, for example I think an underground mausoleum option when you upgrade your church would be amazing, perhaps having the other npcs interact with it beyond just the Bishop, and also perhaps having some npc's randomly sitting in the pews or visitng graves would make it feel so much more alive. Also this may be a stretch, but rather than having the church simply upgrade in a poof, I would enjoy having it be a construction project like the mill where you're given the ability to build it up to make it more rewarding, whether this be preset or it gives you a choice of what way you would like to build your chapel to give replays more variety as well as encouraging a bit more thought. This could also be locked behind graveyard and church quality to further incentivise improving your graveyard and church beyond just the Bishop requirements as the more quality it has, the more you would be able to improve it.

I might be one of the few, but I love the aristocrat level papers costing 12 gold, although perhaps it can be reduced to 10 because at that point you've demonstrated that you know how to form a solid income and the extra 2 gold just feel like they drag out the process. What I enjoy about the mechanic is that you have all of these ways to make money but in games like Stardew Valley they seem to only exist for the sake of making money rather than tangible benefit, so I like having it be a goal to consider profit. I think it would be a cool addition to have some kind of community board at the Dead Horse where there can be random small quests up to make extra cash too, like having to deliver fish, alcehmy components etc as I feel it would provide some variety and make things like fishing, stonecaring, brewing, writing and other skills feel more rewarding. This would be especially good if there was more cool endgame items vendors sold.

The teleport stone is a great addition, I feel it's way too cheap at 2 silver though, I feel it should be closer to 20 or 50, and you shouldn't be able to buy more than one, Although at this stage it's been patched in quickly as a convenience tool, I feel it could beenfit from some attention maybe with a cool animation and/or being able to build your own portals in set locations to provide more options than just Home and the Dead Horse without making it overpowered.

Most of the skills are very satisfying and feel good to earn, unlock and play around with. I think they could benefit from being spaced out a bit more though as normally spirit points end up being a stopping point when I have excess of red and green which means I end up waiting for the astrologer, buy his books, and then unlock 2 or 3 skills on the same day, when I would like it more having it spaced out somewhat rather than occur in waves like that. More skills would also be great to have and I'm certain it's already in the works.

Alchemy is fun but I found it got bogged down with the microcrafting, which I think could be fixed by having one area-specific storage unit that could easily hold all of the alchemy ingredients and intermediaries so you don't need to do as much running around. Furthermore I think a minor improvement would be allowing the teir 2 alchemy table (that combines 3 ingredients) to also make teir 1 alchemy recipies (with only 2 ingredients) by giving a different tab for it. Also maybe recipies discovered through experimentation I found to be rarely successful or worth it, so I ended up relying on the wiki mainly, perhaps there could be way to buy/create/earn recipies for some of the alchemy recipies, it doesn't need to be all of them. Furthermore, I found it a pain hvaing to try and recall which items break down into what components, so perhaps a minor improvement could be that upon studying an item you learn that it can break down into a solution/powder as it does currently, but then, after decomposing it, it then shows what exact solution/powder it breaks down into for future reference so when searching through a chest I can just mouse over items and see for exmaple what breaks down into an order solution. This would clutter the screen though so I would also recommend having it hidden most of the time, but then when holding a button like shift it shows this information when you mouse over it.

A few small bugs; the menus don't have a scroll bar on the side so when playing on a track pad you can't scroll up and down, the Bishop's final quest came up multiple times for me resulting in duplicates of both the salty fork and mirror.

Now with all of the realistic criticisms and ideas out of the way, I would like to mention a few things that I think would make the game even more incredible. Firstly I believe this game is begging for necromancy. The ability to build/summon your own corpse/skeleton with components such as maybe the dark organs and a bunch of embalming fluids to have them do menial tasks such as keeping the donkey's carrot stocks full, being able to grow and/or harvest crops but only being able to produce base or bronze quality for balance reasons or not being able to fertilize crops. I would also love having them be able to move corpses from the delivery chute to the corpse pallets, have them be able to mine stone or iron at a slow rate while keeping marbel exclusively for your character only (again for balance reasons). With this said, if they could do haulng that would streamline the process a lot too, such as being able to make the crated produce deliveries for you, being able to haul chopped logs to the stores or even being able to harvest wood for you. Why I think this would be a good idea is it would further give more reason to do alchemy, care for corpses, and cut out some of the more boring and time-consuming tasks without being overpowered and would not be too much of a stretch for the tone of the game as well as using a lot of already existing assets.

Another fantastic addition might be different armour/weapon options for the dungeons, particularly I think magic spells would be super cool to provide a ranged option for combat using the same crafting mechanic as prayer crafting giving more uses for stories and writing. Furthermore, spawning more enemies in more places at night to keep you on your toes or having special hunts in conjunction with the afor-mentioned notice board idea to give more use to the stacks of monster drops.

Lastly, costumes as you buy social rank and house upgrades please, that would be sweet.

Fun and addictive with a lot more depth than you would expect, defininitly worth the asking price. It's a punishing game, which is why it's good that the controles are tight and focused with good mechanics, it's difficult, but possible to complete, so gold star for that. I eagerly look forward to more content coming out.

However this game is purely luck-based and you need to get a bunch of stat upgrades if you don't practice Caveblazers with the same degree of precision required in open heart surgery. If you see a blessing of looting, get it, the drop rates in this game are buggered and you'll be more likely to find a gravediggers spade with which to dig your own grave on the later levels than some actual healing items or helpful potions, it really should be a base mechanic and not a blessing.

Recomendations to the devs; please remove the Hex potion that permanently makes you take 10% more damage from everything. Every other potion can be countered by drinking one with it's positive counterpart which makes them balanced, the Hex potion just straight up molests you and has killed every single run where I've been unlucky enough to get it, no matter how good it was looking up until that point.

Furthermore, ranged knockback needs a rework as it is the only stat that actively hinders your progress. The Moon Jelly boss won't do the only attack that makes it vulnerable and in all other cases the monster your trying to shoot gets knocked out of the way of your other arrows whereapon they will then come and show you what they think of the little splinters you've been firing. And best of all, if you have piercing and/or ricochet blessings, then 9 times out of 10 you'll be knocking the enemies you're trying to kill from the next own over directly to your front doorstep.