12 Jan, ’25

A Better Review of Critter Cove

by Cal

In my last post, I had a section about playing Critter Cove and my opinions on it. Since then, I've "finished" the demo (as in, I got through all the main progression line that the demo covers - the game lets you keep playing as long as you want and there's still stuff to do) and... honestly, I'd say my opinion is substantially more favorable than it was before.

Now, nothing I said last time has stopped being true. I'm maybe getting used to the voice noise (it turns out that people can in fact have another voice pitch and it's even higher please save me). I've mostly tuned out the slightly awkward running animation, so that's fine. Et cetera et cetera.

The main thing I learned is: once you start redeveloping the island, you get tourism. Do you know what the tourism is? It's a low-scale management sim! You get regular tourist visits and they have style and activity preferences and wander around the island doing things if there are things to do and you earn money from it??

To put it bluntly: I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS. Is this how those My Time At X games work? Have I been missing out on a whole life sim/management sim mashup subgenre this whole time or is this game doing a new thing?? I need to know!!

On the other hand, you get such a limited glimpse into this mechanic in the demo, I can't gauge how in-depth it gets. Maybe it's just window-dressing, what I saw of it is the whole thing, and I'm destined for disappointment. I just know that it instantly shot the game up in my personal rankings.

Ultimately... I was initially dubious about it being worth the current $25 price tag, but even with the irregular polish, based on how much content there seems to be and the breadth of the mechanics, I take that back. I've reached my budget cap for buying new games for the moment, though, so I've just wishlisted it and will be sitting on it for a while. I might play the demo more, but... I dunno, sinking time into a save that won't matter¹ is a little bit of a downer.

Some other things I discovered since I last wrote which resolved some of my complaints (that I hadn't shared):

• Once you discover a cooking recipe, you can, in fact, make multiple of them at once, as many as you have the ingredients for. The single-output mechanic is only for the Experiment mode.
• The "friendship" bracelet quest is actually a functional mechanic and how you add NPCs to your map view! Nice! (I liked the pet chip reference, but I feel like the tone you get from it if you chose to make a human avatar is gonna be reeeeeally different.)
• Crafting workstations will automatically pull materials from nearby trunks! What a lifesaver.

On the less enthusiastic side of things, the issues I still have, which may or may not have been resolved in the paid version and I am assuming have not because I like to keep my expectations low:

• If you talk to an NPC and have an item that would fulfill a quest of theirs - like furniture - in your inventory, you can't not give it to them. I wound up being forced to give a bed to Pokee because she wanted to give me a new quest and talking to her brought up the furniture-quest resolution dialogue instead because I had just gotten a reward from a different NPC that I was 99% sure would be a bad taste match for Pokee and didn't want to give. ESC didn't get me out of it. That really sucked.
• The voice sound makes me cryyyyyy.
• The hotbar is immensely lacking.
  • Pressing a number 1-8 will not just select, but use, whatever is in that slot. And you can't scroll through them. So you can't select a slot without using the thing.
  • Also there are only 8 slots instead of the usual 10 for some reason.
  • Whatever tool you last used stays out in your hand and you can't put it away unless you keep an empty hotbar slot, which is annoying because items will automatically go into your hotbar first when you pick them up if there is no existing stack for them, so your empty slot is constantly getting filled if you're going around doing stuff.
• It's nice that the game will automatically pop up an interaction for the tool that the interactable requires, but if it turns out that there are multiple valid tools, it doesn't visually indicate this at all and if you aren't paying super close attention and are holding your wrench because you last used your wrench and you go to water your dry-soil vegetable sprout in your brand new garden and you walk up to it and hit E like you're used to then you might accidentally somehow have the game decide that the appropriate tool to use there is actually the shovel and thus you dig up your baby vegetable sprout and dump it on the ground, never to be seen again, not that I know this from personal experience or anything.
• The blueprints catalog is awful. No search. No recipe information. Nothing but a progress bar if you aren't done, and a picture if you are.
• I'm still low-key annoyed that I can't place the cooking station inside my house. I want to cook INSIDE!

Despite all that, I still think it looks like a pretty darn good game.