Recent reviews by forestfey

Step back in time and guide a fledgling tribe through the Stone Age in Sapiens, a serene and creative survival sim. Unlike games heavy on combat or chaos, Sapiens emphasizes discovery, community, and ingenuity. While combat and warfare updates are planned, players can still opt for the peaceful, exploration-driven experience that defines the game today.

The core of Sapiens lies in its harmonious blend of pattern recognition, collective learning, and emergent complexity. Each discovery ripples through your tribe's consciousness - from understanding wild plants to unlocking new technologies—creating layers of shared knowledge and capability. Watching a humble camp evolve into a living, breathing community network is deeply satisfying, especially as new systems like waterway navigation open pathways to unexplored horizons.

With its clean, earthy aesthetic and tranquil soundtrack of flutes, strings, and drums, Sapiens creates an immersive Stone Age world. Biomes like lush forests and sprawling savannas are visually simple yet teeming with life, offering plenty of space to build and explore.

From fostering connections with animals to designing intricate settlement patterns, Sapiens lets you weave your own vision of early human potential. The building system becomes an intuitive language of its own, while technological advances create branching paths of possibility, making each playthrough a unique exploration of collective consciousness development.

The Sapiens community is a supportive and collaborative space, with players sharing creations and tips. Developer Dave’s active presence - listening to feedback and rolling out updates like the canoe system - cements the game's reputation as a passion project driven by its players.

In one game, I experimented by using wooden floor pieces as “palisades” around my settlement. The result? Confused sapiens wandering into corners, trapped by their primitive AI pathfinding. It was chaotic, hilarious, and a great reminder of how creativity can sometimes outpace practicality in Sapiens.

Sapiens is more than a game - it's a mirror reflecting our own journey of pattern recognition, community development, and consciousness evolution. Its ongoing transformation through both developer vision and community emergence promises ever-deepening layers of discovery.

intriguing story and soundtrack, each character you meet has their own, nicely recognizable music theme. Dialogues are written well, and the replayability value is given by the sometimes dire choices you have to make. You probably HAVE to replay it, to experience the full range of the story.
You can get really creative designing your own divination cards, and that's a big fun part of the game, too.
Can recommend very much to "woke culture a** wagons" like me (I helped an egg hatch, awwww). I give it 9/10, and only 9, because it's pretty short and already over just when you start to like the characters (and your deck) really a lot!

<conserved Oongha-Boongha> I didn't expect the discovery of so many food preservation techniques to be so much fun, but BOIO was I wrong!
I personally also found it very refreshing to find a game like this, which does NOT have combat, but still the exploration aspect of deep mines- or caves in this case, hrrhrr. The riddles in the caves can be quite tricky, sometimes a bit frustrating, but if you're really stuck, you can find guides online to help you progress.
Farming is very enjoyable, and should feel familiar from similar farm- or life-sim games.
With a twist: Since plant domestication and breeding is a novelty you have to research, you have to discover each plant you want to grow in your fields in the wild first! Seeds are restricted to specific seasons, and the produce can be used in many different ways, the more you progress, the more preparation or preserving options you get. So make sure you also explore the caves regularly to unlock new crafting materials!
You can also learn how to tame animals, and even breed them to increase their stats. The fishing and animal taming minigames are fun, and getting to know each tribe member (or the members of other tribes) feels rewarding in itself, too. Of course you can give them gifts, and of course they like or dislike certain things and start cut-scenes or dialogues depending on friendship level! Depending on the day of month, or the season, you get little events or festivals, which deepen your sense of community and offer more opportunities to get to know your tribe even better.
All in all, can recommend, really cool and cute stone age game.

EN: YES! Play this with your family and friends, like, honestly, it's fun!
DO click all the things, they make sounds! (also helps to solve the little riddles or uncover the little "stories" hidden in the images, I had to chuckle quite a few of times)
You can also make your own maps!
And the DLCs aren't too expensive, either.

DE: JA! Spiel das mit Familie und Freunden, denn, ehrlich, es macht Spaß!
Klick auf alle Dinge drauf, sie machen Geräusche! (hilft auch, die kleinen Rätsel zu lösen, oder "Geschichten" aufzudecken, die im Bild versteckt sind, musste wirklich ein paar Mal kichern)
Du kannst auch Deine eigenen Karten machen!
Und die DLCs sind auch nicht so teuer.

Glory to <insert customized deity here>, let it be known!
I had some sort of X-COM itch for a while, and this game satisfied it... There are 2 main modes, base- and roster building and then the "sacraments", in which new followers are converted to your religion. The combat unfolds kinda automatic, but that doesn't make it boring at all, oh no! The disciples you send into battle/religious argument have different offensive and defensive stats, along with an "element" that makes them stronger or weaker against certain opponents. Specific skills and talents (that determine the development potential and favored classes) even make combos/synergies possible!
With the new tenets and traditions update, your religion becomes pretty detailed (more options in development), and little flavor-events depending on the happiness of your followers flesh it out even more (stoned nudists singing in the rain, what is NOT to like???). The graphics are lovably cartoonish, and the design aesthetics borrow heavily from mesoamerican imagery, also when it comes to music: Lots of panpipes and drums, a bit of strings (guitar?). It varies in the different screens and always keeps you entertained, in the more than 20h of playing I never turned it off.
The early access campaign is long enough to give you a thorough understanding of the mechanics, but short enough to leave you with a craving for more. PLEASE HURRY, I NEED MOAR!
For the future I hope some sort of endless campaign/sandbox mode will be introduced, and I can also see this working in multiplayer (though I deem that unlikely to happen). It would also be nice if you could import your early-access saves.
All in all: Good god game in the making, can recommend!

Oh the drama, oh the suspense!
One wouldn't necessarily expect that from a scifi colony simulator, but it's all (over-)delivered. Due to their behavior and individual quirks, your pawns easily become more than moving spreadsheets with a bubbly avatar (No feet or hands, adorable potato-people!).
I guarantee you will experience SOME sort of story when you pick up this game: It could be a soap-opera with pillaging space-pirates or something explicitly more dark than getting afraid that your stocked up food will last through the winter. -One of my first colonists was mauled to death by a hungry bear, because she was wandering around in the wilderness -naked, during a blizzard- in a psychotic haze that was triggered by her former lover cheating on her... And I was actually quite upset, a lot more than any given time a colonist died in Banished (which is an awesome game aswell, don't get me wrong).
Not to mention the feeling of accomplishment once you launch your finished spaceship and reach the ending screen with credits
-Even though it is a lot more about the journey than the take-off, admittedly.

5 difficulty settings, 3 so-called "storytellers" and editable aswell as creatable scenarios offer a custom-tailored experience catering to (almost?) everybody. The new tutorial makes the game much more accessible, but leaves out enough stuff for own discoveries of the nuanced mechanics.
The game also features an elaborate drugs systems, but since an addiction-mechanic is present and intoxication comes with side-effects, I cannot see it as "glorifying" drug use in any way. ...Looking at the sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad events unfolding during or after a binge, it might be even realistic in a simplified way...
A huge plus for this pre-release is the lead developer Tynan Sylvester being very active in, and engaging with the community (on reddit, too). It happened more than once, that a former mod-only mechanic was implemented into the core game. So, indeed a game the community helps to develop :)

All in all I can recommend this game very much! 10/10

totally cuddly cute with the SPORE-looks and feels!

Due to the well-implemented mechanics and tasteful sqeaky-colors with concept a lot less bore-potential as other titles with similar intentions...
In my own experience, IF there was frustration (from failing missions), the adorable mims made up for that a lot of times, even if something happened that obviously didn't make them happy. The learning curve is very steep when you play close attention to what's happening and how "things" interact with each other, so even a level that seems unsolvable and due to randomness probably even unfair can be solved. With careful (and often enough slowtime :P) observation and reactive change of the "environmental parameters" or "interaction chains" and some strategical planning the Mims is definitely beatable, but hard and riddly enough to scare off people who don't like the roguelike-concept.


The Mim pathfinding AI could be worked on, because from own work I know that even jumping spiders seem able to optimize their expenditures by taking some 'shortcuts'. (Mind my wording, no quotes please) No, that's not it. It's how they react to sudden changes, like when fruit go bad and explode. They go back to a very far-away fruit instead of some that lie right next to them that must 'smell' as well (I loved the smell-o-meter!!!).
So yeah, that's "unrealistic", because it's not impromptu-adaptive. I guess, in some more abstract way, it's cracking a nut with a sledgehammer/breaking a fly on a wheel/shooting sparrows with a a MARSH if you get me. Still convincing enough for fun!

A player controlled or even regular autosave-feature would probably help to reach a broader audience.

Not actually being legally qualified to make such a recommendation, I would also say this game is ok for kids, too!