Settler

This review is for the IGMC 2014 version.

Settler has an interesting concept right from the start, it seems the developer took the contest guidelines to heart and the recommendation about the judges only playing the game for a limited period and decided their game would last less than an hour, to achieve this end, they put a timer on it. It starts at 35.10 from the intro and continues until 0.00 when the season ends and you must return to your cabin to progress. However that is only for the summer season, once summer is over (which bizarrely turns into winter, not autumn/fall, not sure what planet this West America is on, but it isn't Earth) you then get free game play, which makes up the remainder of the hour allotted by the judges.

I will admit that I've never been particular fond of timers in games, if I wanted to beat a timer I'd play a racing game, not an RPG. This game with its farming, fishing, resources gathering and trading is more of a simulation with a Harvest Moon type vibe which though it does indeed have day and night indicators, they're on an endless cycle, this most definitely is not. But as a more restrictive device I had not experienced before outside of the Time Management casual gaming sphere I was interested in seeing how the developer handled it.


Simple enough

The game starts with a short tutorial outlining the basic game play and the timed restrictions, as well as goals and unfortunately also includes a bug; the chest in your starter cabin is endless which means you can get a max amount of wood, fur and tools to start the game. Not something that is recommended for game balance. Once you exit the tutorial then you find yourself in a cabin with a small farm, water source, trading shrine and seemingly bottomless trench attached. Each action you perform uses up a portion of your allotted time and in some cases MP, from planting seeds and collecting eggs to milking a cow.


Houston, we are go for milk.

The wilderness outside the confines of your little farm in the woods is full of resources, wood, stone, metal, coal, herbs and tea and in the case of animals, fur and meat. The animals of course have to be hunted, i.e. fought and whilst they are random it's at a reasonable frequency without being too aggravating. The battles are all standard front view turn based with no customisation or tactics required. In fact it's pretty much a button mash since most of the animals take a single shot to kill, though the wolves needed an extra round. The battlers all look like they have taken off the internet, cut and pasted into an editing programme to remove the backgrounds, badly in most cases, with at least three lifted from a commercial photographer...as evidenced by the battle screen


I'm great with crediting resources, but this is ridiculous.

Though as there do not appear to be any credits attached to the game, this may be the only way the developer could acknowledge the copyright, though it does rather remove any sense of immersion, if the timer hadn't done that already.

The graphics are all RTP and aren't used very creatively and indeed have some problems with blocky and inaccurate shadowing and passage errors. Celianna's tile-sets have been used for tipis in the indigenous village and a few of the fruiting trees but not a lot of care has been employed in their application. Especially as this game is supposed to depict the passage of time, but when the season changes to winter the only graphical difference is your character sprite now has a coat and the ground has a covering of snow, the trees are still in leaf and fruiting, rivers running without frazil ice, shrubs are in flower and you can still harvest tea. The developer has access to leafless trees and ice tiles; he simply chose not to use them.


How? There aren't any doors.

The basic goal of the game is to try and upgrade the cabin in which you live to be more comfortable, including installing a medical station to brew tea and create antidotes, though since I never got poisoned that seems a bit of a waste, a forge and anvil to upgrade your axe and pickaxe to enable faster resource gathering with no MP loss and a more comfortable bed.

Whilst this timed idea is an interesting conceit, I'm not a huge fan of it, it made the game much more about meeting goals than exploration, more about hitting deadlines than interaction. I like to play a game for enjoyment, not point scoring, and Settler made me feel pressured to meet deadlines and goals to a strict time-line when all I wanted to do was have fun. In the end it made no difference, upgrading your cabin within the allotted time didn't get you any additional benefits or recognition indeed the timer served no purpose I could ascertain, other than making the player feel like they were on the clock.



That's pretty much the game in an eggshell.