#salad.recs

[iridium-quality-salad]

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles

[ID: Banner of the game Yonder. It shows an illustrated scene of a farm. In the foreground, a brown-haired player character and a small red fox are napping next to a big fluffy brown animal with huge horns. In the background are two wooden animal pens with red roofs and a pair of the same horned animal, on adult and a young one. The sky is blue and the grass green and dotted with flowers. The game logo is mostly golden, with the O being an illustration of big blue round sails. End ID]

I want to put this whole review under the fact that I bought this game on sale for less than 5 Euro. There will be a lot of bitching, and many things I would not accept with the non-sale price, but it was cheaper than a pizza and kept me busy for over 25 hours (though I admit, I am not the fastest, so I think <20h is realistic).

In Yonder, you are trying to find out about your past when your ship sinks and you end up stranded on an island threatened by the murk - some kind of dark fog blocking areas. Only you can see and befriend the small creatures called sprites which you need to clear the murk, progress the story, and finally discover the (very surprising! :o not) truth about your past.

On your way to do so, you have to gather resources, barter for goods, tame animals, catch fish, and discover secrets.

[ID: Screenshot of the game. The player character is overlooking a vast landscape with a huge mountain in the far background, surrounded by a pink forest. Trees closer to the player are green instead, and the landscape sports many cliffs and an ocean on the right side of the picutre. The sky is mostly blue, with a few pinkish-white clouds. Some kind of whale-shaped animal is floating in the distance between the clouds. End ID]

The positives:

Save whenever, good autosaves, multiple save slots.

Customize character with hair and eye colors, but also body shapes! Yay.

Lots of clothes to discover as well.

Cute animals to tame <3

If you have 2 of the same animal on a farm, there will be a third, baby version, it's so adorable.

Very relaxed, stress free gameplay. No combat, no death, drowning ports you back up on land.

The quest log is very detailed and works as a marker on the map, too.

Tons of things to discover, and very clear progression indicators.

I really liked the lighting in this game. Beautiful sunrises <3

Two modes of fast travel - from farm to farm for a (small) cost, and from one sage stone to any of the others once their quest is cleared.

Big inventory, early unlocked stash.

Some beautiful, diverse biomes.

Keyboard controls can be rebound.

Plays perfectly on the steam deck.

[ID: Another screenshot. The player character is gliding over a purple forest while hanging onto a rainbow colored umbrella. Underneath the character is a settlement with purple buildings, what looks to be an observatory and a giant planet model. The landscape in the distance is covered in fog and tinted with warm sunlight. End ID]

The neutral:

Short, lackluster story. This is not a game I bought for the story.

Farming is very basic. There's 4 different crops, a couple different animals to tame, and you can plant trees, which only give you the same wood you can find all over the place. It's not a farming game, though, so whatever.

The foxes are adorable but don't give anything unique. Some produce items that are harder to get, which is nice.

The game is a bit inconsistent whether a quest will use up your items or not. All the clothes you have to find for the scarecrow you get to keep, while other items get used up.

Hell, you can BUY tools, even though you get every single on for free and they cannot break, get lost, or get dropped. Why tf? I played the whole game having 2 sickles, unable to get rid of one of them.

Crafting is an over complicated, horrible UI, convoluted mess. Why is this in neutral?

Because you can buy pretty much everything. You can break rocks for days and then spend several minutes crafting ever increasing intermediate steps to get a bunch of stone pillars and arches - or you return for a few days and just buy them.

There is no money, so you barter with goods matching prices, which is a bit annoying. I ended up paying everything with potatoes and grass.

With a bit of patience and luck, you can even buy every fish, and it counts for the fishing collection, which, thank you, fishing is annoying.

Very short ingame calendar; a year is 30 days, so each season only lasts 7-8 days.

[ID: A screenshot of the game's crafting menu. It shows available recipes for the profession Constructor, with things such as stone arches and pillars, farm buildings made from stone, various metal ingots, and a set of profession specific clothes. End ID]

The negatives:

(Aka things that made me want to throw my deck at the wall.)

Jumping sucks. If you're standing wrong against a rock, jumping will make you jump back instead of up, which might lead to you falling off things. Luckily, very little jumping is actually required.

You can't select a hairstyle when creating the char, you find them all over the place. Default hair is ugly af. If I hadn't found a cute one pretty soon, it would have been WAY less fun staring at an ugly blob of polygons for 20 hours.

Similarly, you get some basic hair colors and can unlock super fancy ones in the game. Now why is this negative? Because not all default colors exist as shampoo, and I was so happy to find a perfect hair color when making my char, which I would have never gotten back, so I couldn't use any shampoo :(

The. Sounds. This game has some of the most grating, repetitive, ear-bleeding sounds I have ever had the displeasure of encountering in a game. Usually, I would turn off sounds nothing much lost, but:

The. Cats. There is a quest to find 55 cats in this game, and the only way to find them is to have sounds on, because they mew very loudly when you get close - or, I guess, seeing a blob of tiny pixels hidden away between rocks and trees 55 times.

Speaking of the cats. Some of them only appear at certain times, like winter, spring and summer nights, or even summer sunrise. In my opinion, this makes finding them without the wiki tedious; perhaps possible, definitely not worth it.

The only good point about the cats is that there's more cats in the game than you need, so there is a chance you find enough of one breed on your own.

Day/night cycle from 6am-6pm and vice versa, with no way to skip time. Which means for half of the game time, it's annoyingly dark. Makes it extremely hard to see anything, hey, at least you get a lantern. Which bugged once leaving me with a pitch black screen. Its just not fun. It would have been fine if nights weren't 12 hours long.

I would have turned my screen brighter, but days are extremely bright in comparison - even after turning down bloom.

Thunderstorms, especially at night. They just flash the whole screen white in irregular intervals, it's horrible. Once or twice, I had to put the deck down and wait until they were over. Luckily, they were rare.

[ID: A screenshot of the game, showing the player character in front of one of the sage stones; a giant face made out of stone, mouth wide open, mouth and eyes glowing brightly. It's sitting on an uphill slope on a snowy mountain with a huge cliff face to the left. End ID]

There were a few minor bugs; the aforementioned missing lamp during one night, I somehow completed a quest twice and got two badges, and the UI for board quests if you talk to the quest giver NPC without the items present is so bad I consider it a bug. Nothing gamebreaking.

Why do I still recommend it? Well, it was fun. Mostly. It was a real "couldn't put it down" game for a week or two, just one more quest, one more creature. It was less fun to have the game running for 2 real life hours waiting for next winter because I was missing one single cat and had nothing else left to do.

It's also a game I will happily uninstall and never touch again now that I 100% it, which, honestly, is nice, I have enough games to return to. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a way to hide the interface for better screenshots (though you can try to catch the split second before opening inventory or compass.)

If you like low-stakes, cozy games, this one might be for you - but on sale. If you're sensitive to flashing lights, beware of the thunderstorms.

[iridium-quality-salad]

Sticky Business

[ID: The banner of the game, with the title, sticky business, written over purple brush strokes, next to a pair of pink scissors and an open box with several stickers inside: a frog wearing a suit, a piece of pepperoni pizza, a pink popsicle on a stick with rainbow sprinkles, and a rainbow with a heart. Everything is pixel graphics. End ID]

Do you like pixel graphics? Have you ever wanted to run your own online shop, but you don't actually want to deal with taxes, rude customers, or the post office?

Then this might be the game for you!

[ID: Three stickers made in the game, all with a purple theme. The first is designed like a polaroid, with some books in front of a rainbow as picture. Pink tape with I heart is clipped to the top right corner, and a pencil is writing the word books at the bottom. The second is a round sticker with purple night sky, a half moon, and a very round black cat with white eyes at the bottom, in between high rows of purple plants. The third is an assortment of purple potion bottles, crystals, and plants. End ID]

Now, let's be clear. This is not a business simulator. I'm not sure if it is even possible to actually lose the game by running out of money - you can run out of money, for sure, but at least the first time, someone will bail you out. There also seems to be no penalty for messing up/missing an order.

This is a "have fun creating fun stickers" simulator.

[ID: Full screenshot of the game, showing the sticker creator. On the right side are all the object categories, with the DLC one chosen, showing various words like books, gratitude, travel, and work. In the middle of the screen is the assembled sticker, a flowerpot with a red bow. The plant growing out of it has a smiling dog head with a flower above its ear. End ID]

The mechanics aren't groundbreaking. You design stickers from premade assets by placing, resizing, flipping, turning, and sometimes tinting. You arrange them on a sheet of paper to print—there's different types of paper with sparkly effects, too. Customers order stickers, and you pack them into packages to sell.

You cannot pick prices, reorder, promote, or anything like that, only list and delist. Each object used gains experience with each sticker with it sold, which you can boost by up to 75% per order. When an object levels up, you gain points you can use to unlock more elements.

Sometimes, customers will tell you their story and ask you to make stickers with special elements. You can do that. Or you can shrink the element and hide it behind something else 😂

[ID: Full screenshot of the game, packing stickers up for shipping. The top row shows all available stickers. The first one in the list is a small rainbow with a thank you note, available over 1000 times. The left side shows one order at a time, with the message the customer sent, if available. The right side shows multiple tabs of available goodies to include, currently strawberry candy, miniature chocolate bars, and chewing gum. In the middle is an open box, padded with pink paper and blue wrinkly paper, containing the stickers appearing in the last screenshots (despite not being ordered), as well as two pieces of candy. End ID]

The boosting is basically free: just make a tiny (unlisted) sticker that can fit in all the cracks and blanks on any sticker sheet, and you have hundreds of those to throw 15 (max bonus) into every order you send. There's little point in purchasing actual goodies, just like actually using wrapping paper has no influence on anything.

The maximum amount of orders coming in depends on whether you have ongoing "quests" - that is, those customer story email chains not yet finished. As soon as the last one is done, you get many more requests, allowing you to gather currency for unlocks much faster.

There is an achievement for unlocking everything. I got it early—and I am glad I did. Halloween, Christmas, and the DLC brought three huge new categories, and I am not sure if they count for that achievement, but if they do, it would take twice as long now.

[ID: Two more stickers. One shows a green goblin in front of an open book. Left to it are a crossed sword and magical staff. At its other side sits a little ferret. Three red, twenty-sided dice are in the foreground, all showing 20. The other sticker is a christmas three. End ID]

All in all, it was a fun game, and I messed around with it for about 20 hours. I made lots of stickers I loved and shared with some friends, and *whispers* I even managed to spell the word fuck.

Why the frowny face then?

I played mostly on the steam deck.

At first, you may think "whee, full support, awesome", but the longer you play, the more things get incredibly frustrating.

It's impossible to export stickers on the deck. Why? Hell knows. Perhaps because they don't trust a "console user" to find the steam compatdata folder. You can override this by forcing it to not recognize the device as steam deck with the launch option: SteamDeck=0 %command%

The cursor keeps flipping back to the start of the list. Every time you pack the last of one sticker, the cursor flips back to the start of the list. Every time you go into another section (for example arranging stickers on the sheet) the cursor flips back to the start of the list. This isn't so bad the first time. Ten hours in, it makes me wanna cry. Also because:

There is no way to scroll through a list or even hold a button. No. You. Need. To. Press. The. Button. Over. And. Over. Again. To reach that 30th sticker you made.

While you probably break your mouse wheel finger trying to scroll through the end of day report, there's no button that works at all on controller. So you either sit through the painfully slow popping up of the report, or you speed it up and can't see it.

There is also no display when creating a sticker to show which assets are already maxed out on points you can earn. Have to go into the asset store for that. If you make me need thousands of points to unlock things, at least show me what can earn/earned those points!

Very occasionally, I couldn't edit a sticker sheet I made on desktop/deck on the other without having to adjust some stickers.

Also occasionally, the game started up on desktop without the save being synced, giving me half a heart attack as I thought my save was gone.

Don't get me wrong. It's still a good game, and it delivered exactly what was promised, and I wouldn't vote it down for that but. Geez. To play the DLC, I forced the deck to pretend it's a desktop and set mouse/kb controls, dealing with the touchpad mouse just so I could have A BUTTON THAT SCROLLS.

If my cursor had jumped back to the start of my sticker list. One. More. Time. I would have made another sticker that said fuck.

[iridium-quality-salad]

A B X Y Start Select

Hello and welcome to my little gaming corner wave

You can call me Elli if you wish to call me something. My main is @i-can-even-burn-salad, which is a blog dedicated to writing.

I'm mostly a PC gamer. The exception are a vast collection of Nintendo handhelds and a Steam deck, the latter of which nicely combines the best of two worlds.

My preferred genres are single player role playing games, (farming) sims, the occasional point and click or hidden object game, and Guild Wars 2, which is none of those.

We don't talk about the number of unplayed games in the Steam library here.

Tagging system below the cut:

original posts: salad.text - general blabbering salad.recs - recommendations salad.deck - post related to the steam deck salad.pics - pretty screenshots

sorting: genre: rpg genre: sim genre: vn genre: action genre: hog genre: puzzle genre: other

style: text - example: roadwarden style: pixel - example: stardew valley style: isometric - example: icewind dale style: 2d - example: degrees of separation style: 3d - example: zelda: wind waker style: realistic - example: skyrim

other tags: deals and freebies deck verified - i played it on the deck emulation - games that are not for pc modding funny art

some often used tags my fav games/series: tes | gw2 | pkmn | bg3 | poe

Animated gifs are tagged as #gifs.

Now I'm just starting out here, and I haven't posted much yet, so those tags might change. Styles and genres are mix n match.

Want to try organizing from the start for once 🤞

[iridium-quality-salad]

Recommendations Masterpost

For now, I only plan to list games I actually enjoyed, so the rating system will be minimal:

💙 - It's a decent game 💙💙 - I really liked it 💙💙💙 - I absolutely loved it

All reviews can be found in the #salad.recs tag.

🎲 Role Playing Games

-

🪴 Farming/Life Sims

Title: Littlewood Style: 2d pixel graphics Rating: 💙💙💙 Description: Evil has been defeated. Now to rebuild. Delightfully grindy town builder with some rather unique mechanics, no time pressure, and a fun card game.

Name: Merchants of the Skies Style: 2d pixel graphics Rating: 💙💙 Description: Navigate fancy air ships through a randomly generated world of floating islands, trading goods, setting up your own supply chains, and lending a hand in restoring the sky archipelago.

Name: Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles Style: 3d Rating: 💙 Description: A very cute but very simplistic exploration game with rudimentary farming/taming/fishing/gathering mechanics. No combat, no danger.

🧩 Puzzle Games

Name: Colorzzle Style: 2d Rating: 💙💙 Description: Short and sweet puzzle game where you mix colors by arranging colorful blocks.

📌 Other

Name: AER Memories of Old Style: 3d Rating: 💙 Description: Turn into a bird, fly through a world of floating islands, and solve puzzles to learn about the past and save the future.

Name: Fabled Lands Style: Text Rating: 💙💙 Description: An adaption of a choose-your-own-adventure book series with wonderful graphics and comfortable gameplay.

Name: Omno Style: 3d Rating: 💙💙 Description: Beautiful platformer with some technical annoyances.

Name: Sticky Business Style: 2d pixel graphics Rating: 💙💙 Description: Run your own online shop selling stickers put together from premade assets, while experiencing the stories of your customers through their order emails.

Name: Halls of Torment Style: 2d Rating: 💙💙💙 Description: Bullet hell, but the bullets are magic, and the graphics remind me of Diablo 2. Kill kill kill kill and unlock more things to kill better in five different maps.

🌈🔍 Template

Name: Style: Rating: Description: