[ Vintage Story]
Year	2016
Publisher	Anego Studios
Genres	Craftlike, Survival, RPG
Gameplay Loop	★4/5
Ratings
Environment Design	★5/5
Sound Design	★4/5
Fun-Factor	★4/5
Replayability	★4/5
Overall	★4/5

yall sleeping on this one!! just because it looks like a minecraft clone. i can kinda get it. it looks like a ripoff at a glance, but when you actually play it, it's like, an entirely different game. i swear.

the game is really granular and more challenging, for better or worse! i personally dont always enjoy granularity in games, but this game makes it feel fun. the crafting system feels more realistic, and the handbook you're given is pretty thorough, so as long as you look stuff up, you won't get lost on how to make it.

aside from the general wildlife (bears, wolves, bighorn sheep) that can hurt you, there's also 'drifters', weird creatures that come from the ocean that will attack the player (whose species is called 'seraphs' in-lore, rather than being humans). drifters generally will only come out at night, but also live in caves regardless of time of day, as well as coming out during 'temporal storms'.

you have to make food, knap flint for weapons/tools, gather supplies... in that way, i guess you could say it's like minecraft, but the mechanics are much more fleshed out. the basic idea of survival and cubelike layout are the only real resemblance. vintage story requires time investment and some amount of labor before achieving things that would take much less time in minecraft, but at the same time, feels more rewarding - usually i hate video game grinds like this, but the process feels so tangible or tactile that i don't actually mind.

the environment is absolutely gorgeous, by the way. lots of pretty plants, flowers, crops, trees... the worldgen is a little crazy but i think makes it look both alien and familiar. the biomes are 'realistic' and (unless you pick the other setting) will blend into each other more sensibly. and everything changes with the seasons, too!

the player customization is p wild, with a lot of hair/facial hair options and skin colors (which are all nonstandard from humans) and no gender system. also i think its so funny that the player voices are just various instruments. i think at one point when my character was getting eaten by wolves i said "theyre beating the jazz out of me". which is incredibly funny still. you just start honking!

anyway, if you want "the dark souls of minecraft", sure, come and play it! it's fun, and i don't even like grindy stuff like this generally. feels fun. feels wild.

PS here is me and my girlfriend's one ingame-year timelapse of our world together: