Ova Magica Steam Charts & Stats

While this game is in EA still, I will say I have quite enjoyed it thus far and look forward to the full release! It reminds me of a mixture of games such as Harvest Moon, Pokemon, Monster Rancher, and a little bit of Animal Crossing. It's a very cozy cute game with little things called Blobs that you find eggs for, hatch, and evolve them while also utilizing the Blobs for helping with battles and ranching duties. You get to craft things and make your farm look as you want to for the most part. You also get to fish, catch insects, mine, chop, gather, and build things. The battles are turned based too which is awesome. There are also festivals each season (there are only 3 seasons), and you get to build relationships with other NPCS around the same age as your character, which I believe will build up to something like marriage and etc. later on. They are very close to the 1.0 release and there's a lot to do, so overall I highly recommend this game!

Lots of things to do, lots of choices like stardew. Lovely casual game thats better than pokemon.

Love it cant wait for the full update where its the full game

Cozy game. Lots of NPCs to meet and plenty of things to do.

I'm enjoying, and trying to collect all the blobs. It can't wait for more to be added

This is an absolutely charming little game with a lot of potential. I can't wait to see where the devs decide to take it! It feels me with so many ideas and warms my heart to see such a wholesome game among the piles of shoot 'em ups and GTA clones.

Garnet keeps calling me cutie, I think that means we are married now. Ova Magica is a cosy little farming sim where the unique mechanic that really sets it apart from most other farming sims is the blob collecting and breeding. The blobs are not only helpful for the farming aspects of the game but just like most creature collectors you beat the snot out of everyone else's non optimized blobs with your superior creations. The eugenics program must grow and I love mixing the little critters to create the ultimate fighter with the sickest drip. I also appreciate how farming sims like Ova almost always pause the in game time while in menus because other wise my days would be over before I even finish planning out my farms layout for the n'th time. I was not expecting to have to play mini games in this farming sim, but most of the mini games are simple and unobtrusive except for the slider and light all the candle puzzles which I struggle with in every game. The npcs all have great story lines and I got super invested in building up their friendships just to see their stories through. I think it is great how even the unimportant npcs change dialogues and habits as you progress stories related to the main interests. The sprites for all the main characters look great if not a little bit childish, butt gat dang is every 3d avatar dummy thicc. All the blob designs are super cute and they all have great unique features that really set them apart as well. While the sound track isn't anything I find super unique or special is still a solid track that doesnt grate on my ears. Ova Magica is a thourogly fantastic game even in early access, and I am super excited to see how it grows and develops over time!

Good story line, and fun to play

People have already commented exhaustively on how the overworld sprites of characters, including romances, look like children with itty bitty stunted feet. I wasn't playing this game for romances, I was playing for critters and farming, so i ignored those (valid) complaints. But the farming and critter catching is clunky, unbalanced, and such a slog to try dealing with. Contemporary games of this genre have instituted various QOL features such as not making your mandatory items to interact with the world take up inventory space, automatically cycling to the needed tool when you're approaching items, etc. (Fae farm, disappointing as it was in plot aspects, at least jumped those hurdles, for instance.) This game doesn't. It forces you to keep mandatory tools in inventory and sort through them, while a -very- short day clock is ticking by. And not only is it ticking by, but you've got a stupidly small energy bar to deal with and large chunks of that energy being depleted just to break a single boulder or chop one tree (and inching away with every swing of your bug net, with its small catch rates.) And if you don't make it to bed on time, you're subjected to not just a small knock to your energy the next day or a couple bucks for a rescue team returning you to bed- but a complete lack of energy regained. Some of the highest downloaded mods for games of this genre are ones to extend day length, and/or allow people to play overnight, or keeping the day cycle untouched but removing energy bar limits so there's only one restraint to player actions, because they're sick of these sorts of mechanics. They're not original, and they've lost all their novelty. A huge section of player bases just want to play the game and interact with things, and not have that experience dragged out by artifical barriers slowing them down. Yet this game not only continues them, but doubles down on how punitive and annoying they feel. What's more, the upgrades for tools are -extremely- expensive given how tiny the margins for profits on your crops are and how many things you need to unlock beforehand to get to the point where a single upgrade is feasible. Expenses include a barn; which, even with years of genre knowledge to make optimal choices, I couldn't unlock until I already had a small pile of prize eggs in my magic storage box. You're going to want back up critters to enter the mining worlds. Also, the adventurer guild entrance fee to unlock those worlds. And even once you have the barn up, there's various hurdles to jump through for hatching decent eggs; with the "most useful" thing for hatching being an item, a decoration recipe, in the very early festival that you likely won't have the ability or meta knowledge to buy. And if you miss buying that, your barn is going to be stuck in a low rating for ages, because other decorations that come along soon after are -only- outdoors decorations, and the barn temperature control items are also insanely expensive and not having them further tank your hatching- making it so that any eggs you hatch will be functionally duds. Given how expensive many of those eggs are, either via festival money winnings or grinding in the mining worlds that you have to pay to enter and fight dozens upon dozens of their parent blobs over several days for a chance to get a single one thanks to the low drop rates- it would be a waste of those precious eggs to hatch them in poor barn circumstances. Trying to battle with these crippled blobs is a nightmare. Especially given the severe spike in power that wild blobs have in new levels; as well as how sharply villagers' blobs level up after a fight or two. A major problem because you need to try fighting the villagers on a semi regular basis because they appear to be the exclusive sources of a significant portion of the various foods your blobs will be craving. Trying to get items to enhance the blobs is also expensive. Never mind the food items to feed them when their cravings hit- why are cheap to make sports toys so inflated in price?? Seeds can cost a sensible 25 to buy, but a tennis ball is 3000?! 3000 for a tennis ball?! Seriously?! Prices like this make no internal sense for the world, they exist solely to punish the player as money sinks. Then once you shell out the money for the items to play, the mini games to play are janky- most notably not registering key presses properly and those delays not even being consistent in how long it takes for them to register so you could adjust your presses accordingly to what you know the delay will be. So, good luck leveling up your critters. And also, your critters are subjected to not just limits on their fighting energy/power, but also out of fight energy limits to do their advertised farming/building type functions. So if you were expecting this to be like pokemon with unlimited use of TMs/HMs when outside of battle-joke is on you. I honestly can't think of another game in this genre that I've played that was so badly balanced in so many areas of gameplay. I had such high hopes for the range of critters to collect and ways to help you interact with the world, but this is just torture. This game does not reward your efforts, and it certainly doesn't respect your time.