Preserve Reviews

I like the challenge and the premise. It's addicting if you like puzzle games.

Great and relaxing game. Love the art style, music, and the overall feel of the game is something no other game has. The only downside is that after playing for long periods of time it can get boring but never stops being fun.

Amazing game. Makes my brain happy and is sooo relaxing :) Really good puzzles too! Harder than they look, but you can enjoy the game without stressing about them too. Highly highly HIGHLY recommend

Great puzzle game. I have started playing in an early access and even then it was already fun and content-filled. With new releases and bioms I can say it really stands out and provides a good amount of well-balanced (but random enough) strategy placement puzzles that kept me hooked for a long time!

Great game when you need to kill some time, want something relaxing, and something that's 'just engaging enough' to be entertaining leaving you with gamer fatigue. Good map variety, strategies are easy to learn but hard to master, and it's just random enough for each play through to feel different. Plus, the visuals are pleasing and the soundtrack is even better. Seriously... the soundtrack is surprisignly good.

I really love this game. I bought it just after launch with no prior knowledge about it, and I'm so glad I did. I love that there's a weekly challenge and a global leaderboard for the scores. Even though I've finished all the levels, I still like to go in to make pretty systems, or to try find ways to get more points. I'm looking forward to additions to the base game!

Relaxing game. A lot less restrictive and frustrating than Dorfromantik. I really like the card buy/sell mechanic. One small thing I noticed is that the tall logs on the marshland tiles change to a much worse texture/model when zooming out. Would also love to see steam trading cards for the animals.

Fun puzzle game with lots of variations on the core game to keep it interesting and challenging, great way to start the day

Preserve strikes, as far as puzzle games go, a great balance in its risk-reward design. It doesn't punish you too harshly for your mistakes, nor does it forgive you too easily for making them. Its mechanics are (generally) easy to understand, but also complex enough that you'll continue inventing new card arrangements well into the endgame. And above all else, every new highscore milestone you reach and every puzzle you solve feels truly earned. You'll definitely have to put in the work if you want the gold medals, but at no point does that work become frustrating. And all this is accentuated by the game's charming artstyle and an excellent ambient soundtrack. If I have to say something bad about this game, it's that there's limited replay value if you're not gunning for the higher percentiles on the leaderboards. I also encountered several progress-halting bugs along the way which forced me to reset some levels (which is especially frustrating on the large maps!). I did report these issues a couple of weeks ago, although I never received a reply from the development team. That's not to imply that this game has been abandoned though - the developers seem to be busy with adding extra content to the game. Still though - these are ultimately small blemishes on what has otherwise been some of the most fun I've ever had playing a puzzle game. Plus, it's seriously good value for the asking price.

Fun game, but I have one major gripe with this game (And other puzzle games that suffer from this same problem). There seems to be a disproportionate amount of RNG when it comes to getting the perfect expansion hexes and tiles to place within them for classic mode (or high-score mode). This is great for randomness' sake, but when you have to score a certain amount of points, its insanely frustrating to constantly score the same amount of points or less no matter what you do differently. Long explanation below, skip to the end for my summary of the game as a whole. Let's take the Continental Medium stage as the prime and major example: -To score "3 stars" on that stage you need to score 2100 points. There are river cards that give a point bonus to adjacent biome tiles, and ponds that do the same. -Placing a perfect biome involves 12 like tiles and 3 like animals. (Think 12 forest tiles with 3 boars). -You unlock the large expansions as you score more points, and each expansion is a large hexagon made up of 19 smaller hexagons. -If you place a row of three ponds you score the most bonus points. -If you have a river of at least 18 tiles you unlock the water mill, which gives an additional bonus to each water tile (Rivers and ponds). -Ideally, you would strategically place biome tiles in a way that it utilizes the river bonus and at least one pond bonus. The only way to truly do this is to plan ahead for river and pond placement, taking into account the different tile elevations that influence the river's path and making sure not to place ponds directly adjacent to any rivers. With those things in mind, imagine you get the perfect expansions to allow for an early 18 tile long river, unlocking the water mill. You manage to correctly use all the provided tiles for biomes of exactly 12 tiles, with as many rows of three ponds as possible and any extra rivers are no longer than 3 tiles. The ponds aren't touching the rivers anywhere, there is little to no wasted space with sharp turns in the rivers, and you have 3 matching animals in every biome. You have likely scored every single point you can, and you're sitting 200-300 points short of the 2100 needed for the "3 star" rating. You try again, getting a similar score with a seemingly completely different configuration. You try a third time, and you eke out 10 more points from the sheer luck of getting an extra pond this time around. Now fast forward 2 hours, you still haven't gotten past the 1900 point mark and there is no explanation anywhere as to why. The only thing you can do is hope you randomly get an extra couple river or pond cards and that the expansion hexes you get are good enough that you can get the long river needed for the watermill quickly so you can maybe score more points this time, possibly. Now don't get me wrong, I get this is a puzzle game, but whats the point of any puzzle if there's no surefire solution to it? If you're relying on RNG to draw the perfect tiles and get the best possible hex configurations, it ends up being extremely frustrating when it doesn't happen after dozens of attempts. It also takes away from the challenge of the puzzle when there's not always a solution. A good puzzle is solvable in one way with a set outcome. A great puzzle is solvable in multiple ways and has different outcomes that are all counted as success by the puzzle's parameters. A bad puzzle is one that relies on chance and bashing your head against the wall enough times that it eventually works. I hate nothing more than a puzzle game that relies mostly on RNG to achieve an outcome. This game unfortunately has that exact thing as part of its core mechanics. After 15 hours that has turned me off entirely to the rest of the game, regardless of its better or not. I also just don't want to spend hours retrying a puzzle because I can't get "lucky" enough to score enough points. Summary: Great game that suffers from a glaring negative; you will not be able to solve or "3 star" every stage consistently due to card draws and expansions being completely randomized while requiring a set score to complete. I can't really recommend it when there's better options out there like Dorfromantik or Islanders that do the same things in a much less frustrating format.