Forager is an open-world adventure game that was developed by the game studio HopFrog and published by Humble Bundle. The game was released in early 2019 for PC but is also available on multiple consoles and for mobile devices.

In Forager the player needs to obtain resources hat spawn throughout the world to build new buildings, items and tools. The world can be expended using money and you’ll unlock different biomes this way. These offer new materials that can be used to craft better gear. Buildings are used to refine raw materials. There are also puzzles that can be found on certain island and you can fight against the enemy monsters around the world.

We know that there was a scandal around the game and its lead developer who was apparently blaming his team for the poor state of the game while disregarding improper working conditions and payment. This is why I want to mention that this small review is only focused on the gameplay and not the people behind the game. In general we distance ourself explicitly from the potentially unacceptable happenings behind a games development and focus on the for the player important parts (e.g. the gameplay). If you’re interested in the details of the scandal check out this article from NintendoLife covering the incident.

Things I like about the game

What I really enjoy and at the same time also hate a bit is the fact, that you can progress in any direction of the game. I, for instance, focused on getting a stable supply of fish going by installing fish traps in the water and building an furnace to fry them. On the other hand you could go right into mining ores or killing monsters. Or just start farming money to get rich or spend hours of your time using the carpentry station to build beautiful furniture and design your environment.

The skill tree also shows this freedom of progressions. If you acquire a certain skill you unlock more and more that are part of the same category. But you’re able to choose skills from all categories.

Progression also allows you to make parts of the game easier like mining ores with an automated miner or installing big weapons to defend your base from monsters. The more you progress through the game, the more advanced your equipment becomes. At some point you can even craft drones that help you with your tasks.

Although you get more advanced the requirements for new gear also grow with your progress which makes the progression curve feel well balanced but also a bit “grindy” towards the end of the game.

What I really enjoy, is that you’re able to play at a difficulty where dying doesn’t really matter and you can just continue playing your game. Fighting is way more fun this way as you don’t have to worry much about not succeeding in your first try of a boss fight.

On the other side you can also increase the difficulty to match your wishes. Even to a point where your game is completely over when you die, similar to the Minecraft hardcore mode.

As the game wasn’t updated since 2020, the community has created many mod using the forager modding API. These mods change parts of the game and can make your playing experience easier. Mods apparently don’t effect your achievements progress so you should be able to acquire all the normal achievements easily. All mods can be found in the steam workshop.

What could be improved

What’s missing and what also was promised is the Multiplayer Mode. This update was canceled after the scandal we mentioned above and will probably never come to forager. There is a community mod called PenPal but it requires you to open ports on your router and also could destroy your game saves.

In addition to that I was mildly infuriated, that the option to turn off the item popups is simple not available. This leads to your right half of the screen being permanently clustered with text which decreases your ability to see the right edge of the map immensely.

The game isn’t updated anymore and was solely used as what feels to be a cashgrab from the developer HopFrog. We hope that the promised updates return in the near future but we sadly don’t really don’t count on it.

Conclusion

I would recommend picking up the game when it’s on sale or even from a third-party key seller so you don’t support the dev as much as possible. You do need to be aware, that the game is a finished product and can only be enhanced through mods. If you really take your time to complete every little thing you’ll probably spend less than 80 hours on this game.

Get Forager here

Quasimorph: End of Dream was released on May 31, 2023 just a few days ago and has already earned a lot of positive feedback in the steam reviews. The game is a free prologue for Quasimorph, a 2d “dark turn-based extraction RPG” developed by Magnum Scriptum. I took a look at the game myself and will share my experiences and opinion on it in this first look article.

Impressions

In Quasimorph: End of Dream you play as a PMC, a cloned fighter for a company. Your goal is to eliminate all enemies in the way to your mission objective while grabbing valuable items and enough food and medicine to survive.

You can only see an area around you, the rest of the map is hidden. Rooms are mostly separated by doors that can be opened. Furthermore you can find some barriers that provide cover or hide behind corners to avoid enemy contact while healing. If you die during a mission all the progress is lost and you’ll return to your spaceship.

There are lots of weapons that can be found which all use different ammunition types and have stats that make them either good for close of ranged combat. Speaking of close combat: you can also attack with melee weapons as most of the enemies on the easier stages of a mission.

Similar to the variety of weapons there are also different enemy types to be found in the game: some look like human mercenaries, there are spiders and some weird creatures that turn into a different enemy after you kill them.

Things I like

The idea that you can only see a certain area of the map and enemies could hide behind every corner is scary and exciting at the same time as it adds a sense of dynamic to the game experience and really motivated me to keep going even though I failed most of my early runs.

All items and the environment is beautifully textured in a really detailed pixel art style. The animations feel very smooth and the sound effects are pretty scary and well done. Especially the shotgun sound feels very nice. The soundtrack is a banger and really helps to convey the scary atmosphere and pressure while fighting in the dark rooms.

The dialogue boxes have a nice design to them and even though you get thrown into a story you get to know fast what you need to know and who you are as a character in game. There is an audio dialogue playing when you arrive after traveling to a different planet.

Things I don’t like

The game more or less throws you into your first mission, there is an introduction to what you’re supposed to find as a mission goal but no explanation of game mechanics. This can be found if you click on ESC > Help > Controls.

Surviving gets quite hard after taking an elevator to a different floor of the base in the Venus “Flower Dream” mission, getting good gear and enough medical items is mostly luck based and many of my runs just ended by getting demolished by some big monster that grew out of a smaller one. But I think after you get familiar with the mechanics this won’t be a problem anymore.

Conclusion

Get Quasimorph: End of Dream here

A pixel art dream – Game appearance

You play in a very beautiful drawn “pixely” environment with a static table in the middle. During battle there also some very nice fight animations.

The music is amazing but some of the sound effects like the fight completion sound can get annoying when you hear them to often.

Because of the pixel graphics and the fact that the pc version was “created”/published after the mobile version this can run on nearly any device.

Kill X in Y – Gameplay and Story

The base game took me around 8 hours to complete and the expansions another 8. With the expansions you just unlock new quest, characters, items and map areas. The basic gameplay idea is always the same: Quest mostly evolve around killing a certain amount of monster either for their loot or just for the sake of it. Sometimes you just need to talk to certain npc and travel or transport some items from A to B. Characters are controlled using buttons so you only need a mouse to play this game

In Knights of Pen and Paper 2 you travel around the land of Papero to different locations with different monster, NPCs and quests.
The main goal in the base game is to defeat the paper knight who wants to take over the world you are playing in. In the DLCs there are other story lines but I don’t want to spoil too much as it’s way more fun to discover it for yourself.

You can sleep nearly everywhere to regain health points and energy. There also also dungeons in which you can’t heal and need to clear rooms on multiple floors to gain rewards. These are hard to clear at the beginning but a good source of experience points when you need a higher level for a quest. While traveling you might also stumble across some hidden encounters or ambushes.

Experience points are earned by completing quests and battles. If you gain enough for a level up you can invest skill points. Every character has two active and two passive skills you can improve and two normal passive skills. In the beginning its a good idea to concentrate on one skill for each character so you can use them effectively.

Your efficiency in battle is also based on health and energy stats and your battle values are calculated based on the 3 attributes: Body, Senses and Mind. You can increase these later in the game using certain equipment but it is import to choose the “right” combination of character class, race and type.

The fights themself vary in difficulty so I recommend picking up a healer quite early in the game and getting a good single target damage dealer.

A shop can be found in the major cities/villages where you can buy and sell items and ingredients you need or want to get rid of. If you don’t want to sell your precious items you can put them in a stash that can also be accessed in the major cities.

Speaking of ingredients: There is a crafting system in the game that you can use to make special weapons and enchant them.

Beat the Virtual out of Reality – Grind

If you’re playing on Steam there are 33 achievements to get. I would say 32 of them are doable in a normal play-through.

One of them being the “Beat the Virtual out of Reality” achievement requires a lot of grind and cost me around 5 hours to do after I completed the game story wise. You basically need to complete the whole Bestiary which is a ingame book that tells you weaknesses and other traits of monsters. To complete it you need to kill 30 of each monster which is easy on lower level but annoying once you get to higher level monster.

The other problem is that you need some expansions to get all achievements. The only game expansion you are able to buy on steam is “Here be dragons” for around 5€. I was able to purchase the other 2 expansions with ingame currency. So I recommend checking the “Magazine” button in the top left corner first to see if you’re able to get the “Here be dragons” expansion for ingame money.

Conclusion

If you like pixel style game check out our review about Minecraft.

Get Knights of Pen and Paper 2 here