Return from Core Reviews

Lilith best girl - can't wait for updates the story was great, the game is fun, and the girls are cute.

There could be a game here at some point in the future but right now it's plagued with all kinds of QA issues I would have expected to be resolved way earlier in the dev cycle. In the first thirty minutes I had: - Quests get text overflow the quest tracker instead of wrapping to the next line to the point I had no idea what it actually wanted me to do until I just stumbled on the quest markers. - The first main story quest after the very first cave segment bugged and cant progress. See point above. - Music randomly hard cuts to silence then fades in to the track again, this includes during cutscenes. - Shift to hold torch out while moving will randomly stop working a few seconds after fighting or mining until another action is taken and shift works again.

Better controller support would go a long way for me. So far..6.5/10 Controller support would bring this up to a solid 8/10 for me personally

It starts off strong, but tapers off to meh. I fully cleared the first area, and what I found were a ton of cloned dungeons, 1 boss, and about 7 different enemy types. In 5 hours. The base building is fairly shallow. And the pretty large skill tree, which at first seems fun. Doesnt make much of a noticable difference in the game. The courting system seems pretty pointless. Everything in this game feels tacked on and shallow. No depth to a single part of this game.

First up, please ignore all the people claiming this is just like Core Keeper or a ripoff. I can't help but feel they're not complaining about the game's merits and just want to raise a fuss, kind of like the flax Doom clones and SV-likes keep getting. So, if this isn't Core Keeper but is in the same genre of underground exploration, what is Return From Core? It's a very heavily story-focused, highly linear game where you meet, take care of, and grow closer to monster girls. There is automation and building efficient systems, there is an RPG system with stats and interesting abilities, and there is cooking here for interesting buffs, but the whole of it is, Do you want monster girls? If yes, please get this. I really enjoyed the system, especially when it was revamped to have less of a focus on the grind of making hundreds of specific materials to upgrade things. Crafting was very heavily streamlined, you have to engage with all the content rather than having it as an optional thing, and having the monster girls join you in combat was a great addition. They break the game as every boss was designed for taking it solo, without other characters taking threat and pumping up the damage, but it is just fun. I've been playing this since early access and it's come such a long way. There are still issues, of course: English translation isn't the best, controller support is crap, and there are bugs like the missing inventory issue. But, if you want a game that's got monster girls (again, very key here), some automation, and exploring a decent plot with a harem protagonist that isn't a blank slate that's for you to self-insert, please consider getting this.

[b]Disclaimer[/b]: For the sake of everyone reading this, I will [b]not[/b] be delving on the numerous tiny bugs that this game has. [i]Yes[/i], it is possible to softlock yourself. If it seems like you can break something, it probably will, so don't do it. I had to reload a few times due to getting stuck in the hot tub. With its poor pacing, the numerous inconsistencies, and overall sloppy design, it honestly feels like the game began as a "haha monster girl hangout" concept - and only later did someone realize they needed to build an actual game around it. A [i]lot[/i] of the story issues stem from the rough English translation. If I had a better grasp of what was happening, maybe I wouldn't have to question my sanity every time a character 'dies' for no apparent reason other than 'because plot'. [h3]Automation? Not really.[/h3] I’ve seen people compare this game to Factorio in terms of resource automation. That comparison definitely oversold me when I first bought the game, so let me break down what “automation” actually looks like here: - You have conveyor belts and underground segments. There are three tiers, but realistically, the first tier is all you’ll ever need. - Assembly machines (1x1 tiles) can craft any workbench recipe - no recipe specialization, no real complexity. - Furnaces exist in three tiers and are used to smelt ores. Standard stuff. There are no alloy recipes, so manganese smelts directly into manganese steel. Somehow. - Spiral cores - a critical component - require a special building to craft (1x2 tiles). Each higher tier of core needs the previous one, except the first tier. - Drone ports (2x2) are barely functional. They can only import or export one item, not both. They frequently stop working for no apparent reason. Sometimes reloading the game temporarily fixes them - until they randomly break again. For the space they take up, they are incredibly underwhelming. - Your camp members auto-deliver items to machines whether you want them to or not. There’s no way to turn this off, meaning they’ll often interfere with your automation by dumping items into machines that are already being fed via inserters. - There’s [b]zero[/b] control over item insertion. You can’t limit how many items go into a building or container. Since items stack up to 9999, the first machine in any manifold setup will often hog all inputs until it's full, while the rest starve. You can alleviate this by setting the grab amount to 1 for each inserter, but that's only a band-aid solution for manifolds. It doesn't fix your camp storage from completely backing up with copper plates when production exceeds demand for a long enough time span. [h3]Story and Progression[/h3] The environments also feel inconsistent, both visually and narratively. A recurring issue is that the game does not respect object persistence nor narrative coherence. For example, Lilith can be captured (or otherwise out of action), but she will still remain in your base hanging out like nothing happened. Progression is gate-kept heavily for arbitrary reasons. Want to upgrade your drill elevator to go higher? You'll need some catfish whiskers to upgrade it. Sometimes, you [i]can[/i] upgrade the drill and unlock new floors - but the game still won't let you access them until you've cleared the main questline tied to the previous area. It feels like artificial padding. Also, anytime a new mechanic is introduced, (say for example fish keeping/breeding), it is tied to the current main questline. That means: - It is not optional. - You physically cannot progess without building a fish tank. - There is no reason fish gatekeeps you from going and talking to someone. Why was this mandatory? It would have been much better to have it has an optional quest. It's just more options for farming food (which we [i]already[/i] have so much of!). [h3]Cooking[/h3] The cooking system is built around ingredient categories, meaning a tomato and a cucumber are interchangeable in a recipe that just calls for “vegetables”. That makes sense in the context of a sandwich, but not in the context of another dish that specifically requires tomatoes, like the tomato sauce of a pizza. According to the game, you can make soup using honey, tomatoes, and actual rotting fungal matter because each item fits the required ingredient category for making soup. Gross. [h3]Combat[/h3] Combat starts out decently balanced in the first couple of floors, but quickly devolved into glass-cannon warfare. Defense stats become irrelevant as enemies' attack strength increased faster than what is possible to mitigate with defense in your current progression phase. Ironically, I ended up using the pickaxe from the first boss all the way throughout the entire game - not because it was strong in combat, but because its special ability is fantastic for clearing terrain (especially once you realize the slotted upgrades make the special's AOE larger). Most other weapons feel redundant by comparison. [h3]Bad Mechanics, Worse Logic[/h3] I don't think the gear durability system adds anything. There's no real benefit to it - it's simply enforces you to return to your base periodically so you can craft "repair gears" and fix your tools and armor. It doesn't add challenge and depth; it's just busywork that pads out the gameplay. Some things in this game just don't make sense at all, even by video game logic. For example: Take Hydroelectric power, for example. In real life, it works because [i]flowing[/i] water has kinetic energy. So what does this game do? Well... you install a pump... and pump water into pipes... and then route the pipes into hydroelectric generators... and then you get power. What in the actual fuck? [h3]Boss Fights[/h3] Bosses in this game just are kind of bad. They are genuinely interesting (lore wise), but the actual implementation is rough, to put it mildly. One boss gives you an on-screen warning: "You hear rumbling from the south." About three seconds later, the entire floor turns into lava and instantly kills you. You’re supposed to duck behind stone blocks, which supposedly protect you - but here’s the issue: your character’s hitbox is too fat for single-tile gaps. You need at least two tiles to survive. Then there’s another boss with a clue delivered by an NPC right before the fight. You’re told you’ll need deep sea bombs to fight it, since it stays submerged. The bombs themselves are described as “sinking below water and exploding. Useful for underwater targets.” Naturally, you’d think you're supposed to throw them into the water to damage the boss. Nope. You’re actually supposed to throw them into the boss’s mouth. Guess how long it took me to figure that one out. [h3]Final Thoughts[/h3] There [i]could[/i] have been something interesting here - a quirky survival-crafting game with automation and monster girls. But what we got instead is a game that feels like a prototype with a story duct-taped on top.

Controller support is janky and barely works, the english translation is so terrible it makes the game unplayable. Thought those would get fixed on the v1 release but unfortunately they weren't. Would not recommend buying in its current state.

Sad, but this game is not ready yet. I like the premise of the game and the art is nice. That being said, there are lots of little bugs and annoyances that make the game really tedious at times. Also, the pacing of the quests is really terrible and they should just get rid of them tbh. The 1.0 release seems rushed and as a non chinese speaker, i would refrain from buying this game.

Was interested, plays decent, but the translation is so bad that I had to stop playing. I rather wait for a update that fixes the translation than play the current version of the game.

It's like Core Keeper mixed with some parts of factorio and you get waifus. 10/10.