Forager

Forager is an open-world exploratory crafting game. A while back I was looking for more farming/gathering games and I played a gamejam demo called Forager and thought, wouldn’t this be fun if it were a full game? Wellllll, it’s here and it’s on Switch.

Like Cat Quest, this is a game that is exactly what I need at a specific point in my life. I fell out of Hollow Knight when I died twice in a row without being able to loot my corpse, therefore losing A LOT of money, so I’ve been needing to play something to unwind but having a hard time accepting that loss and the introduction of trickier jump mechanics, which I am not a fan of. Right now I need something charming, chill, casual and portable that is not Stardew Valley, and Forager is apparently it. It does have a very mobile-grind vibe that I fully expect to catch up with me at some point, but the developer has a roadmap that includes a farming update. Looking at the Steam devlog, this is very much a living game, and it looks like the developer is going to be adding content in perpetuity. The Switch is at 1.0 and the PC version is at 1.9 I believe, so there is some catching up to do.

The game starts wide-open with little instruction, which is not an issue for fans of the genre. On my second game I generated a NPC with a quest fairly early on (catch 2 lightning bugs), which gave a semblance of direction (learn to make glass to make a bottle to catch bugs? Or learn to make a net? Something like that.) I appreciate that a new game can apparently go in any direction, on my second game I took a distinctly different upgrade path (focusing on monetary instead of resource gathering) and it feels very different.

I think Forager is going to end up being what Forgotten Isle could have been with a larger dev team and regular updates.

One issue I have is the strange keymapping. There is no way to change the controls, so at first I found myself repeatedly punching the wrong button for basic actions. I can only assume the other buttons are being reserved for more complex actions, but hopefully keymapping will be addressed in a future update. Dying is currently very anticlimactic, you die and get game over, then the game sends you back to the splash screen and you click through and start back where you left off with 1 heart. The game “punishes” you by throwing you out of the game loop for about a minute, which is a weird design choice to be honest, death either means something or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, there’s no reason to leave the game loop or–honestly? Even go through the motions of death. IDK on that one.

The game doesn’t pause when you open the menu, so things continue to regenerate and the day/night cycle continues, but it looks like enemies don’t attack while the menu is up, so you don’t have to worry about being in a safe place.

Resources quickly grow back, but sometimes in undesireable places (e.g. right in front of the forge I built). Trees can grow everywhere, and I have one island nearly full of trees because I’ve been working on other things and haven’t cleared it in a while. I think the player will ultimately need to build a base off-land to prevent stuff from constantly spawning underneath but I’m not sure yet.

I’ve started two games so far and both generated very different islands as I expanded, so I’m hopeful this one will be a nice diversion for a while.

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.

Forager III

As my kid has grown older and more adept at using a controller, I have enjoyed watching games in my library get a second life. They recently got sucked into Forager and I got pulled back in as well. They are really into cosmetics thanks to games like Fall Guys and Riverbond, and I had to explain many games are not like that, but Forager does offer cosmetic rewards for achievements.

They don’t really grok efficiency resource production, which is the cornerstone of the game. For example, they are currently obsessed with accruing money to buy land. I tried to help by demonstrating farming and cooking, but their current strategy is crafting bottles, filling them with rainbow, and selling for about 14g. It’s interesting to watch them update their strategies as they play.

As for me, my old game got slightly borked after the big update, and on top of that end-game clickers are a hot, chaotic mess by nature. There’s stuff flying everywhere (automatic loot collecting enabled), I’ve got a ton of factories producing god knows what, the auto-collection is so aggressive I have to work to empty an inventory slot long enough to add something new (this is actually a really annoying problem), and so on.

Auto-collection with cash-register dingy sfx can be really rewarding (see: Vampire Survivors) but the current state of my main game is too hectic to really enjoy. The update back in 2020 added a lot of new stuff, including nuclear power and bosses, and reset my stats in weird ways. Since I didn’t encounter the new stuff organically I have no idea WTF to do with any of it.

I started a fresh classic game and put my considerable obsession with pixel organization to task. As winter approaches I often take solace in what I’m going to call “digital immersion.” I used to call these “time wasting games” but that does a disservice to the necessary seasonal process of clearing RAM and rebooting my brain. Open sandbox crafting and farming games are good choices this time of year.

Forager IV

I asked my kid if they could have any nickname, what would it be. They said donut.

My meticulous, power-optimization philosophy is at odds with Donut’s free-wheeling, expansionist capitalism.

I started a new classic game and began triaging Vaults and Infinite Furnaces for inventory management. This actually works very well! The moment resources that require conversion are harvested (e.g. ores) they are automatically crafted into ingots and sent to a vault.

One issue with Forager is the RNG can sometimes be a little wonky, it tends to run fat and lean. For instance, you might have 10 torchbugs spawn. If you don’t collect those there’s a chance you might go for several hours without seeing any, which could create an annoying softblock depending on where you are in the crafting tiers. Inventory space limitations are the only barrier to harvesting all the things, and the alternative to stashing rare items is to sell/donate them and then wait until whenever the hell the game decides to give you another one, which could be a long time.

Meanwhile, Donut expanded their empire so rapidly they soon ran into inventory management issues that dramatically slowed their ability to progress, as they were constantly having to sell things to open inventory slots. Donut doesn’t multitask, so QOL upgrades like backpack expansion tend to fall to the wayside because a random dude asked for 50 flowers or whatever. The chaos of their gamestate gave me such low-key anxiety I invested a few hours to grind additional inventory slots and upgrade their tools. I’m not sure what that says about me and I frankly don’t care to examine it, but it legit bothered me.

Donut appreciated the gesture, but we both lost interest in the game shortly thereafter. I think it’s because the mid-late game is essentially for psychopaths, regardless of how well you organize and plan ahead. Elements that help pace the early game, like energy consumption, become a nuisance. As the map becomes more cluttered, the fiddly controls become more of a hassle. Tool upgrades don’t keep pace with the increased difficulty of mining/crafting certain resources. And so on. Essentially, the difficulty of the game is increased by making things more annoying. You would have to be–frankly?–a special kind of insane to enjoy this gameplay. A significant subsection of gamers actually are insane so it works out but still.

Forager is a game you play until it stops being fun or scratching an itch, and it’s not necessarily a game you complete. There are still a lot of things I haven’t experienced, like the Void and bosses. So who knows. Maybe a few years from now I’ll dive in again.

Forager: Donut Edition

This update isn’t even for me, it’s for Donut. For some reason, Donut became obsessed with maxxing this game sometime in January and they have maxed out… IDK basically everything. 70+ hours in, they’ve maxed health/level. They looked up YouTube videos on how to do… whatever the heck they’re doing! Exploits, glitches, you name it. I’ve honestly never seen them geek this hard for a game before. They’ve unlocked stuff I didn’t even know existed. They have maybe 30 droids?

Obviously, the kid is a gamer, but this was the moment where I realized Donut might end up being even weirder about games than I am. As a parent, you have to set boundaries, and I limit game time to 1 hour on the weekdays and 2 sessions (before and after lunch) on weekends. This seems to be working okay for now. Donut is still struggling with emotional regulation while playing competitive games (I had to put Gangbeasts in game jail, along with Fall Guys, and Fortnite has been pre-emptively banned because I know my child), so I’m happy they can get into a single player game like this and really dig in and find enjoyment.