Mudborne Steam Charts & Stats

Very cute, I love it. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of content there is.

I'm in love with this game, it's so much fun. It's cute, the puzzles are great, and it has a delightful amount of detail and frog society lore. It's the perfect mix of challenge and laidback-ness I've been searching for, I can't recommend it enough.

Feels like a mix of Fez and Stardew Valley. Cute atmosphere, cute frogs, cute eugenics.

After losing days being completely sucked into APICO, I needed more. So I bought this and... it's different. I mean it's very similar, but there's just so much more story and nonsense. I was really just looking for another here's a journal of 100 critters go breed them, but this is just so much more involved and overwhelming.

Absolutely amazing and underrated. Ribbit.

To start: I'm a great enjoyer of puzzle games, crafting and farming games, and a complete nerd for wildlife and genetics. So I thought that this game would be up my alley, and I don't doubt that it's the perfect game for many. Just not for me though, but we'll get to that. Mudborne is a puzzle game first and foremost. There are no survival elements, there's not much in the way of base-building, and so the building and crafting and farming mechanics are purely there to support the puzzle mechanics. There are several main types of puzzle: where to go next, what conditions cause certain fungi to spawn, what frog genetics are required to progress, and how to achieve those genetics with the fungi / bugs you have access to. All these interact with each other in the usual ways. If you've played a Minecraft tech modpack, this is precisely the gameplay loop of figuring out a production chain and then implementing it. The main reason I don't enjoy the game is that the puzzles aren't satisfying. They are straightforward to solve (just basic linear equations), and if you're having any trouble at all, there are generous hints and outright solutions that are unmissable, often part of the trigger to start the quest itself. Then there isn't any fun in implementing a production chain either, since each of the things you need has just one method of production. Which brings me to the tedium. Everything in Mudborne takes just a little more time to happen than it needs to. You will need multiples of many frogs, and you never know what you'll need to breed them, so you'll end up hoarding lots of materials. Storage units don't have quite enough slots. Movement and travel in general is excruciatingly slow, and as another insult, you can only speed up your movement speed by eating the very bugs that you need to catch to breed frogs, which by the way, also spawn based on RNG weather. Tool durability is an entirely misguided mechanic in this game, serving only to waste time and / or inventory space. Oh, yes, and mushroom / weather RNG that makes the above much, much more annoying to deal with. There's an option to make fungi bloom almost as soon as possible. I'd strongly suggest turning it on. The combination of these problems makes Mudborne a very awkward game. If you enjoy slow-paced games for the farming and base-building, well, the game doesn't have much at all in those respects, and you will have to travel to farm mushrooms in different biomes anyway, so no cosy base for you. If you enjoy puzzle games for the satisfaction of solving them, well, the puzzles are spaced out so far apart (artificially, it seems, just from how painfully slow everything moves), and their solutions so straightforward, that the reward is not worth the time spent. And if you enjoy exploring and seeing new things, the slow travel and puzzle mechanics mean you'll spend more time at base and walking back and forth than actually exploring. It was somewhere around the time that I had to backtrack to base to pick up another one of the chonker frogs after using one, and then realizing that I needed to go back for yet another, that I realized that the game just isn't for me. Its pacing is at odds with its puzzle mechanics, and its other mechanics aren't any fun in themselves, so most of gameplay ends up being a lot of nothing for no point, punctuated by the parts when you actually get to solve a puzzle.

I very hesitantly do not recommend this game, though it's for some reasons that are kind of nitpick-y and niche problems I have specifically that you might not. I thought I would like it, I felt like it was a good choice for me with how positive the reviews were and it seemed designed well on the surface in a genre I am very familiar with and enjoy a lot, but the UI was too cluttered, text was too small, and colors too low contrast for me to stand playing this for very long. I have visual processing issues and this game just was not compatible with them, especially with how much reading and dialogue is in it-- the text was the worst part for me to get through. I couldn't really tell where I needed to be going and what could or couldn't be toggled or not because there were no pop ups indicating to do so. The tutorial felt rushed adding insult to injury, it just tells you to go out and do something with no helpful explanations or visually showing you how to do it. It got to the point where I couldn't really tell what the game was even about or what the goal was. I also did not like the way the controls felt in game, and how the game's mechanics and flow felt overall. Some reviews had similar feelings but continued to push through and eventually figured it out. I liked the quest book style though and I love genetics, farming, and management sims. I feel like the style visually was almost reminiscent of old school RPGs on the GBA but plays like a Minecraft modpack. Maybe if I had more patience I would have pushed through and eventually gotten the hang of it. I don't have that patience right now though nor the want to punish myself when there were other games I was more interested in playing. There are a lot of other games on the market right now that are very similar but with better UI/UX and aren't so irritating.

I couldn't wait for this game to release, played APICO, and wanted to play something similar. Gameplay is very beautiful, and gives off cozy vibes. Lovely game :))

Overall very solid, and surprisingly deep and complex. A very successful purchase :) Try the demo! It's incredibly generous, MORE than enough of the game is shown to get a full feel for it, and it'll even transfer your save file (iirc). There's a lot of small touches that make this into one of the more polished games I've played in a while. Tons of info is written down right where you need it, help dialogs all over and easy to find, a comprehensive and excellent tutorial-guide, pinning windows, gorgeous sound and visual design, the list is huge. It adds up super well. There are also a couple things that jump out as outliers because of this: - a few minor spelling/grammar issues (more than rare enough to not be a problem, just slightly jarring when they do occur... one of which is in like the 4th or 5th sentence you see in the game) - the intro tutorial/guide-book is excellent but also A WHOLE LOT OF THINGS. The second is I think actually a bit of a problem, and the game would be better if it were restructured to be a bit more incrementally-revealed. E.g. rather than needing to know the whole breeding mechanic and sequences to do roughly anything in the game, have 2 kinds of frogs at start and access one of the ponds with one, and then start introducing breeding to unlock the others. ... though I do kinda like that the whole game is wide open once you've finished that guide. Learn it up front and you're completely free. It's just a lot to approach all at once, and I think it might turn away some people early that would otherwise enjoy it. --- THAT SAID. The game does a great job keeping track of everything you've learned, and showing you what you need when you need it. So though the first step is rather large, it supports you very well after that, and it's not anywhere near as overwhelming as it feels at the very beginning. Highly recommended, just do push through that first ~1h of heavy learning :) You can get all that done in the demo though, so just give that a go and explore a bit after, no need to buy and stress about the refund.

This game is so inexpensive despite how much thought clearly went into every bit of it. Although I'm still in the early game, it's very peaceful to play. :)