Definitely Opinions

Garden Paws feels like a culmination of Stardew Valley and My Time at Portia, both games I have sunk an unhealthy amount of time into. Garden Paws is essentially a farming sim a la Stardew Valley where you raise animals and grow crops to turn a profit. Like My Time at Portia, though, you also get many requests from the local townsfolk that involve crafting items into other items. But Garden Paws doesn’t just borrow from other games; it improves on them. Watering crops, for instance, is barely even a chore considering how quickly it can be done. This saves you so much time to explore the island and gather flowers or feed the wild animals in hopes of bringing them back home. There is often so much to do in a day that I frequently just let my character pass out at midnight instead of trying to rush home for a good night’s sleep.

The other side of that coin is that the amount of to-dos can be overwhelming. I don’t think I’ve ever had less than five active quests at any one time. My current quest list is so long that it runs right off the bottom of the screen. I appreciate always having goals to work towards, but some quests are given to you long before you can actually fulfill them. There are quests that require materials which don’t become available until a later in-game year, so the quest just stagnates indefinitely. You can always try your luck in the dungeon to speed up access to rarer gems, though. I like that the dungeon is purely optional, as opposed to My Time at Portia where story progress was often locked behind such combat moments. The “combat” in Garden Paws sucks, not surprisingly, but since it’s not required, I can’t complain.

My only real complaints with the game are pretty minimal. For starters, the UI is rather clunky. Managing items in your inventory is a hassle, particularly when you need to move an item from your backpack to your main task bar and vice versa. There are some glaring bugs in the game, too. When playing online, animals and cooking stations will suddenly become invisible for one player. And speaking of online, the game’s password system is completely broken, because randos can still join your session whether it’s password-protected or not. Any issues can be reasonably dealt with, though. The only thing that might be a legitimate turnoff for people is just how long it can take to progress in the game. You have to sell a lot of junk to be able to afford quest-related upgrades like the tree farm (60,000 coins, to be exact!). I don’t know if I’ll ever get the tree farm, but I’m still having fun with everything else the game has to offer.

I feel obligated to talk about this one, as I’ve reviewed every other game so far. I think this might be my least favorite of the bunch, though. I can’t tell if the game is objectively not as good or that I’m just getting bored with the formula. XC3 doesn’t really “fix” anything, nor does it do anything substantially new. I guess the main selling point is that you’re getting a new story? Unfortunately, I’ve lost all patience with XC’s cutscenes. There is an interesting story buried in here, but each cutscene is sooooo long and takes forever to get to anything of substance. I wish you could fast-forward through the pointless banter, but alas, your only option is to skip the cutscene altogether. And if there were multiple cutscenes back-to-back? Oops, you just skipped all of them. I also hate how the cutscene that follows a battle almost always shows that the enemy you just defeated in real-time did not, in fact, get defeated. Hey, video game designers: stop doing this!

By now, you are probably already angrily typing, “Why do you even play these games, bro?!” For me, Xenoblade Chronicles has always been about fighting monsters and exploring huge territories. And I still got plenty of enjoyment out of both of those aspects. I have mixed feelings about the battle system, though. It’s a little too easy to over-level yourself. The game practically encourages you to do this with its ever-tempting “bonus XP” system. And so I reached a point in the game where battles stopped being a challenge, where I could just steamroll over most story-related bosses. Bumping the game up to Hard made it a little too hard, though, so I was kind of at a loss how to bring back the excitement of those first few chapters where I felt like my team had to be perfectly balanced to win. From Chapter 4 onward, it basically didn’t matter what my team looked like anymore.

To be fair, it’s my own fault for getting over-leveled. By Chapter 4, the game world has opened up enough that there are plenty of side quests to distract you from the main story. And you know me, I am a sucker for side quests. The game has a feature that will show you the fastest route to any given quest marker, but I had a lot more fun trying to navigate the world based on the map alone. So many markers have very roundabout ways to get to them and, like the bonus XP, you have to make a conscious effort not to let the game do the work for you. Side quests are fun to track down, though, because many of them result in getting access to a new hero and character class. I really liked experimenting with the different classes and juggling which character should learn which class next. I could do that for hours—and I totally did—so I still had fun in the end, despite my other complaints.

After playing Clouzy, I was left wanting in terms of a combat-free adventure. Clouzy’s biggest drawback was its vagueness. Time on Frog Island, however, is vagueness done right. It’s a similar type of game, though. You’re plopped on an island with basically no guidance other than the obvious main goal: fix your boat somehow. There are frog folk on the island that you can talk to, but who knows which ones can actually help with the boat. Plus, all dialogue is presented as icons instead of text. So a frog might just shout, “Image of a blue bug!” at you, and then you have to figure out 1) where such a bug is and 2) how to make it blue. Needless to say, there’s a lot of running back and forth across the island, looking for whatever a certain frog wants and then returning it. And, sure, that sounds tedious, but it actually works.

What helps the game is that a lot of quests are optional. Once you learn which frogs can actually help you, you can pretty much ignore the others. And there are sometimes multiple solutions to a problem, as well. But, of course, there’s still incentive to help everyone on the island, if not for the achievements, then for the extra perks you can get in the game. Like, I didn’t realize there was a power-up that would let you swing from certain cliff edges until long after I’d already fixed the boat. And you can build a house, too?! The house doesn’t change much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s little touches like this that make Time on Frog Island a fun, relaxing experience. I’d probably rank it close to A Short Hike and Haven Park, considering the length it takes to complete it and the general vibes it gives off.

Clouzy is a relaxing, combat-free adventure game with the added gimmick of caring for little clouds. I think the developers themselves admitted that Slime Rancher was a major inspiration for this game, though Clouzy is very scaled back in comparison. The structure of the game is fun, though, where you have a small world to explore and a home base to raise clouds in. Parts of the world are off limits until you complete a puzzle elsewhere, and resources can be gathered throughout that go towards making items and food dishes for your clouds. In theory, this should work just fine. In actuality, Clouzy makes some truly awful design decisions.

This is another case where it wouldn’t take much to “fix” the game, but what’s broken is broken. First, the game is way too vague. I always appreciate when games lay off the hand holding, but this is taken to the extreme. I shouldn’t have to fumble for ten minutes trying to figure out how to turn in a quest item. I was about ready to quit at one point, because I had a sick cloud and no clue how to make medicine for it. The list of recipes didn’t have labels on anything, so I just started crafting everything I could until other useful recipes started to unlock. But after this crafting spree, I was left with a bunch of junk that I had nowhere to put.

And that’s the second design mistake that Clouzy makes. Inventory management is a pain… in… the… ass. You can only hold five items on you at a time, and you cannot drop items willy-nilly. You can only put them in a chest or discard them in a trash can. But your starter chest only has five slots, too! You have to earn money to be able to upgrade the chest. You can also buy a backpack, which increases what you can carry on you. However, the backpack is a separate UI from the main five items you’re carrying. Why did they over-complicate this?! It ruins any fun you might have running around the world, because you’re never sure what you should pick up and put in your extremely limited inventory. I just can’t understand hindering your players like this.