One Lonely Outpost Reviews

You've played a farming sim, right? Stardew? Harvest Moon? You get it, right? Maybe this one is less complex (though it only just came out, as of this writing, so who knows if you future folk have more features than I do), but it IS set in space. Which is neat. Pixel graphics are gorgeous. NPCs are endearing. Bug catching mini-game is a bit of a grind. It checks all the boxes! Do what you will with that information.

Very mid, teetering to bad. Poor pacing. Poor writing. Performance on deck is questionable as I get constant small stutters/fps dips at random. Really feels like it was pushed out the early access door without much thought. It has an interesting premise (terraforming a planet) but this done pretty quickly compared to a lot of the other gated content. A few bugs. Cant recommend as this genre is already over saturated and has many good offerings already.

I love these kinds of games and this one looked like it had promise and potential. But nope. Just not enjoyable. Starts slow and gets slower. The controls are terrible and there's just no hook. Nothing there for me to want to keep playing and see what tomorrow brings. .

There's almost something here.. I've played a decent amount and the progression events / characters are fun, but DAMN does it take its time getting there. There isn't much to do day to day, especially if you set up your farms with sprinkers. It's really just waiting for the next event to hit most of the time, I have been tempted a few times to just sleep through a day entirely because there's nothing that needs to be done - you can only resource harvest so much before it's just too much. The day-to-day needs work, and I don't know what to put there, but it's a real slog at the moment. There's just a lot of waiting. I want to like this game, and there's something there, it's just not quite right yet.

I kinda hate to put a No on this, when an honest answer is I recommend it... if you're tolerant of it being in a rough, incomplete state. But it's just not properly finished. Pacing is erratic, quests come out of nowhere with no respect to your progression or season, relationships progress and have conversations as though you've done something or are somewhere wildly different than you are... But the game core is good! It really is. There are all the ingredients of a good game here. It's just... it's not done. And given that it 'released' like this after a very long period of silence, there is no reason to expect it will ever actually be done. So ultimately I enjoy the game for what it is, but I can't really recommend it to people. Which is too bad, because like I said it could be a really good game, but you're constantly running into bugs or bizarre design choices that just make it frustrating instead of fun.

I initially got the game when it first launched in early access and it was a bit of a mess. Since it's hit 1.0 I came back but my god this still feels entirely incomplete. *Basic things are missing (like being able to manipulate items on your toolbar when accessing ANY crate or machine) *The pacing is extremely off (everything takes sooooo much time to advance) *Talking to characters is repetitive (same lines over and over and over) and they come off as utterly flat and uninteresting *You can't actually tell what you're getting through quests and messages until after you close them (and they look so identical to each other it just all blends together) *Some graphical effects are incredibly rough (I love seeing every 2D element turn entirely yellow at the end of the day) *Some systems aren't even explained properly (For example, alot of people complain in the reviews about needed a previous crop but you can in fact grow them out of season using an incubator BUT THE GAME NEVER TELLS YOU ABOUT IT) *Gameplay explanations don't match up with what is occurring (Being told the colonists want food weekly, but its actually monthly) It feels like this should be back in early access. This is 100% incomplete, buggy, unpolished, and feels like either the dev got in over their head or just gave up. The game could be good, but at this time it still feels unfinished and I recommend avoiding it until it actually gets that polish.

edit 10hr in: I still stand by this review! [b]This game can be very slow to start & a little confusing.[/b] It doesn't help that all the guides are from before the 1.0 launch and not always accurate (for example, all the guides read that ore doesn't spawn back on the overworld, but they do for me! They totally do. Very slowly, but they do.) It's very slow but also very chill. Other life sim games are sometimes very... "let's automatize this, let's automatize that, let's make tons of money", this isn't the vibes I'm getting there. It feels like a lot of lonely, hard work for now, and somehow I like it-- it is how I imagine life on Mars or elsewhere to be. Eventually, the plot starts to pick up the pace. Anyway, if you aren't worried about a little confusion and taking things slow, this is a nice little life sim game, with a few interesting twists that you will enjoy if you like terraforming games like Planet Crafter. Especially on a big sale, I paid around 8 euros for this game and I feel very good about it so far.

This is an example of a game in early access that the Devs run out of money, or interest and instead of abandoning the game, they slap 1.0 on it and release it. There's so many problems with this game that I'm honestly not going to waste my time listing them all out here, as I have no confidence that the Dev will actually fix any of them. I will say that while I was able to slog through it for almost 12 hours, I came to a point where I just couldn't progress any further. The game is broken into seasons like most farming games, and some crops can only grow during certain seasons. (there's a tutorial? pre-season but it wasn't clear if it would repeat after a full year or not. Any way about half way through the second real season, the Main quest tasked me with making a dish that included Soy beans. Soy Beans only grow during the first season. There was no indication that I needed to grow this crop previously, and I'm not even sure if it was available to purchase seeds for that early. So now I'm faced with having to go through the rest of season 2, 3 and 4 before getting back to the season in which Soy beans grow. That is hours upon hours of nothingness until I can advance the main quest line again. No thanks.,

So originally I was going to recommend this. I had a good first impression. I did notice from the beginning that there was confusing aspects. Despite there being a tutorial tab, there's so many holes that they do not explain, and because it isn't a popular game, it was difficult to find info online. Things I liked: -character design -terraforming and watching grass grow for the first time Things I didn't like: -terrible pacing and constantly feeling like there's nothing to do to fill my day -certain bugs wouldn't let me click on them -quests that I can't finish because of the wrong season and requiring certain plants so i have to wait a whole year -the cat and dog always in the way -could feed the wildlife and it would follow me for a while, but wasn't sure if there was more to the mechanic -the first festival I got max score on the middle game (too easy) and none of the villagers gathered, so it just felt like a letdown. -the world feeling too repetitive and empty. Most days there's nothing to do but collect fish and bugs and plant seeds.

If I had to compress this review of One Lonely Outpost to a single word it would be ‘perfunctory’. There’s a lack of depth, of texture, of any sense of time to everything. The visuals are good but stop a little short of being truly memorable, from the alien vegetation and creature design to the landscape. A competent team shooting for the solid B+ of a lazy but gifted student. The music is the same, pleasant without being memorable. But the plot is nonsense, everything including the terraforming is rushed, which leads to nothing really happening for long spans of time. Quests are introduced before you can complete them, or after their windows of access to needed parts are closed for the year. Everything feels vague and imprecise, from the made up roll of seasons whose invented names occlude rather than elucidating, to the controls, to the inventory management, which quickly becomes cramped even without the clunkiness of moving things to and from the hot bar. The early game, alone on a hostile world is aimless but atmospheric, alone completely alone on an airless world struggling to eke a life out of dead rock? Something could have been done with that! The success of The Martian proves there’s good stuff in that struggle against a truly unforgiving world. Instead we get a lot of nothing, and then a space magic ruin terraforms the world in the space of a few months! After which the game decays to waiting for colonists to show up and stockpiling resources we don’t ave any real use for just in case. Gene modding had promise, but instead of the dream of making better personal strains of staple crops, its just a tired 90s adventure game of trying every combination till something new shows up. Having to eat is a nice touch of survival, and I felt the weight of it, but even a colony of 11 only asks a few meals every month be provided, so there’s no pressure to farm, no real reason to expand and very quickly nothing to do but run around the (small and actively made smaller by barriers) feeling map, talk to every one once (you’ll quickly stop hearing new lines) and then go to bed early. There’s none of Stardew Valley’s iterative shifts and exploratory goals, and several NPCs don’t even get introductory cut scenes. Farm automation is both pointless because of this, and arrives much too soon to feel the value from being freed from daily watering and none of the tool upgrades feel needful when there are already too many hours in the day. Some how despite this, processing of ores and things, takes too long. Days will pass on big orders turning rock into silicates, limited not by abundance but by patience. Its a shame because the core concept is interesting and evocative, and the ideas behind the cast are interesting even if a few stop short of true originality, but not enough is done with any of them. In the end I am left with wanting more, more to do and more reason to do it. Even one of the NPCs is heard to remark “No one ever mentions the boring parts of adventuring out into the unknown”, So I am doing you all that favour, this really is one lonely outpost,