(And other indies). That’s the subtitle, but I didn’t want to make the actual title too long.
I have one thing I need to say right away. Get rid of limited inventories. Completely. In the year of our largess, 2026, there is no reason for a limited inventory. When I played Skyrim (Bethesda), I only installed one mod. Well, two. One was to add snow because I love snow. But the other more important one was the infinite inventory for the horse. You can bet I downloaded that mod tout de suite.
If I remember, that game was especially egregious. It’s a vast open world game, and you could only dump your stuff at one of your houses? I think? And the fast travel was limited. I felt like I could only go two steps before filling up my inventory. Oh, and you could loot everything in every house.
Once I installed the endless inventory horse mod (you just dumped everything into your horse), it made the game 100% more enjoyable. I didn’t have to worry about picknig things up and where I was going to put them.
In Coze Grove: Camp Spirit (Spry Fox), the inventory is so limited when you start out. So is the storagce in your tent/the fire. This is the same as the first game, and it was just as annoying then. There is no reason for it. I mean, I get that there’s an emotional reason for it, but all it does in make me irritated/mad/upset. Oh, and here’s the post from yesterday in which I explored my mixed feelings about the game.
I do wonder if it’s just that it’s easier to code that way than to make it endless? I don’t know why that would be, but jI know roughly nothing about coding. I will say that in this game, my motivation dwindles and dives when it seems like every three seconds I have to stop and move things into my storage or sell a bunch of stuff.
In the first game, at some point when I was rolling in money, I could max out my storage and buy chests to plac e them around the island. That was a stop-gap solution that I didn’t like because I never knew what was in which chest. I think you could access items from the main chest from any of the chests if you already had them in the main chest (the storage at the fire).
It was a mess, though. I really was hoping it would be one of the things that would be improved for this game. Alas, it was not. As far as i can tell, it’s exactly the same. A frustratingly small inventory that fills up in about five minutes. At least you can stack the same items, but only up to a certain amount of them.
It really disturbs the flow when I have to stop every five minutes or so to sell off a bunch of stuff or stash a bunch of items. Another small gripe is that when you run out of space, you simply cannot pick up the new item–so it lays on the ground where it is. And there is no marker to let me know where that is. I have in the past not been able to find something that I could not put in my inventory. It’s not a big deal when it’s a common resource, but if it’s one of the spirit logs (the reward a bear gives to you when you finish a quest for them. You give it to Flamey to make him stronger), then, of course, I want to find it again.
I really like the new content, which I’m trying not to spoil. It follows the same path as the old content, but–see, it’s like this. One of the things I really love about these games is learning about the backstory for each bear. I can already tell which bears are going to be my favorite–one in particular. And I know that the stories are going to tear me apart.
This is the strength of these games–the stories. The devs really shine when they can get past the gameplay and really dig into the meat of the stories. This is why I play these games–not so much the daily resource gathering, though I do enjoy it to a certain extent. There is a sweet spot of just enough resource gathering, and I think this game is just on the ‘too much’ side. But, again, that’s partly on me because I don’t stop once I get goiong.
The fishing was introduced, and it’s better than in the last game. I think I mentioned this in the last post. You have to cast the bobber in fornt of the fish without hitting them on the head. I think in that game, you had to throw it a certain distance from the fish based on size? I’m not sure if I’m making that up, and I’m not going to listen to it. I do know that if you bopped them on the head, they would disappear.
I was warned about the same in this game, but it has yet to happen. It’s because in tis game, there’s an aura/shadow around the bobber, so it’s easier to gauge where it’s going to land.
Oh! Oh!! One another positive addition. There’s a fluffy dark companion dog? Cat? It’s supposedly a dog, I think, but it looks like a cat to me named Crw. I’m not quite sure what it’s there for other than to be utterly cute and play fetch, but I’m down with her being my friend.
I’m still mostly positive about this game. There are just a few things that if tweaked would make the game so much better. I’m laxer about these things in a smallish indie game than I am in a triple A. I will play this game every day, I’m sure. I will probably 100% the game or at least be tempted to do so. I platted the last game, and there were two or three achievements that completely killed all my interest in the game. I really hope they don’t have one in particular because that one was actually painful.
I am hopnig that there will be more focus on the stories and the bears themselves than everything else. That would make me a happy player, indeed.