What Did I Play on 2019-08-18?
- #forager
Forager II
Having invested some time, I can more thoroughly report on this.
Forager is very much a player-first clicker. Pay-as-you-go clickers are fundamentally awful because there's a lot of unnatural shit built in to make you stay in the app, with the purpose of making the player impatient enough with their lack of progress to buy upgrades. A clicker paid up-front has no reason for such gimmicks, and Forager manages to dispense with them. In fact, for a $20 clicker I have to say there is already a good bit of content crammed into this game.
The basic gameplay for a clicker is you click a lot and get resources, and you turn these into other things (by crafting, building, buying), to unlock more stuff you can craft, build, or buy. It is the highest evolved form of an Excel spreadsheet (almost sentient). They can be a lot of fun to play if you're in the right frame of mind, and they can be incredibly tedious if you aren't. You know the satisfaction one feels when one harvests a planted field in Stardew Valley? Well, in Forager you get that feeling constantly, times 5, or 10, or... where I am, about 1000 because I have like 5 mining rods going. In a lot of ways, Forager is a little like Stardew Valley, but with FASTER and MORE in terms of resource collection and expenditure.
The game has clearly been through beta/early access and the timing is good. Multiplication bonuses and upgrades unlock when they should, so by the time I need 100x of a resource, instead of 10x, the game speeds that process up. You can unlock items that collect for you, which is important. I unlocked an upgrade to get coal with every mined rock, which is huge, and then I unlocked mining rods, which are contraptions one builds to gradually mine a certain area. Now I have a steady stream of rock stuff coming in, which is necessary because at level 20-whatever I have other things to do besides individually mine rocks. It balances out.
There are nice small touches. When you pause the game by opening the menu, enemies cannot hurt you but the game keeps running in the background. When you come back the resources you were waiting on are finished, because they kept running while you were gone, the shop has refreshed if you have one, and so on. This is was a good design choice and a REALLY NICE way to allow players to circumvent some of the waiting, intentionally or otherwise, and another reminder that the developer is less concerned with keeping you in the game than he is with you actually enjoying your time there.
Everything, even how to play the game and progression, is unlockable, so the simple act of leveling up brings surprises. I was quite surprised to find this game has nuclear power plants and oil rigs, for example. There is farming, alchemy, cooking, manufacturing, and magic, which I am only just now starting to open up. The game also incorporates dungeons and Zelda-esque loot puzzles. I haven't yet gone into a dungeon, I have completed some of the puzzles. There is a combat update forthcoming.
There is a farming update coming, as I mentioned previously. At the present stage, farming is pretty primitive. You dig a hole and toss a seed in there, and it grows. This is actually really useful at certain points. For instance, I needed cotton, and was able to plant and harvest a field pretty quickly. Now I just do a blitz run through the sheep fields. Anyway, chickens lay eggs when pet, and you vaguely wave a bottle at a cow to get milk. There is definitely the potential for more and I can see how it would add to the game.
Earlier I thought Forager was kind of like Forsaken Isle. That's not quite right. Forager ramps up pretty quickly, and since you unlock islands as you progress it has less of an exploration element in that sense. I think there is a place for a player-first clicker but the issue is sooner or later, no matter how thoughtful and player-conscious a game like this is, eventually you reach the point where there is a grind. At this stage, A TON of shit is going on, I have a steady stream of incoming resource popup notifications and the constant cha-ching of inventory being added. Inventory management is, by far, the most pressing issue, and in a game of 'get all the stuff' that's probably unavoidable. My level updates are increasingly fewer and farther between, and I've reached the point where I need resources that might require the rough equivalent of 100's of items to craft.
I think it's probably impossible to have a game like this that doesn't eventually become a grind unless you have other stuff to balance it out, and obviously the dev is trying to do that. So this is where the comparisons to Stardew Valley become misleading. You are probably not going to get 100+ hours out of a game like this unless you just really fucking love resource management, but I think if you remotely enjoy going into the mental space clickers can provide, this is a pretty ideal way to experience that.
I wouldn't mind starting a slower-paced game at some point, but by its nature, it's only a matter of time before you end up in resource gathering hell (or heaven, depending on your perspective). It will be interesting to see how long it takes me to max out the content. Some players said about 10 hours which seems right.