Whiskerwood Reviews

Shockingly well-polished game for early access. It's pretty easy so far but what is here is extremely well presented and it's a great new take on the genre. I quite like the taxation system and how you choose how much help to get in the early days. There seems to be a rebellion factor as well so it looks like eventually we will be able to declare independance from the evil aristrocatic royalty and the primary conflict will come in that way, which I find super cool and a neat new way to approach the colony management genre. Definitely going to be playing every major version of this and watching the release carefully. Just like Timberborn, we have something truly unique and interesting here, and, again, it couldn't be more slick and polished than it is. Has all the feel of a complete game in UI and UX, just needs time for them to flesh out and balance the content. Update at 4 hours: Wow, the game just gets better and better. Really incredibly slick UI, and everything is simple to control yet complicated in it's execution. Love it.

Love this game. Took me a long while to figure some things out, and I've just broken into steam power, so now I guess it's finally time for me to start learning the belt systems. :'D You can be as directly involved or totally disconnected as you want. Some days in the game are almost like an idle game for me, sometimes I'm relocating Whiskers left and right because there's a big project in a new part of the settlement that I want to see come to fruition. It's just a lovely game. Very glad for the many settings we can adjust, because the pirate raids really weren't my thing; so I simply don't have them! The game is as relaxed or stressful as you make it. This was my first real city/colony builder, and I think it's opened a door for me into the genre. :)

its so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ peak I got so addicted to this game I pulled multiple all nighters even though I had labs the next day. Can't wait to see the direction this game goes in future updates.

This game is really adorable and kind of addicting to play, honestly. If you enjoy games like Oxygen Not Included, base builder style games, you're going to really like this one. It's cute and I like the design of it.

Very good city builder. I enjoy the limited space forcing you to build vertically and inside mountains. The game gives you tools to do it too; you can unlock conveyor, elevator, and train tracks. The overall aesthetic is charming and fitting.

4JUL26: There are some neat ideas but the gameplay is very choppy. I'm just not feeling it at this point. A lot of resources are restricted by terrain so your initial success depends on careful planning but you can't really plan for a sprawling city builder. The 3d terrain management feels clunky. And every X minutes depending on your play speed you have to end the day, the days are part of a gameplay mechanic but it's more disruptive than immersive. I wan to like this game and it's got a lot of potential but I wouldn't recommend it currently.

Whiskerwood has a very interesting colony management concept with a charming visual style. I like the idea of building and organizing a settlement with layered production chains. The game still feels like it needs some polish, especially around stability and object management, but the core gameplay loop is enjoyable and has a lot of potential.

Got this in some random bundle, turned out to be, not only the best game in the bundle, but the best game I've played this year. If you like Banished, you'll love this. If you like Dwarf Fortress, you'll love this. If you enjoy Factorio, you will probably enjoy this. If you like city builders, managers, colony builders, you'll fricken love this game. Highly recommend.

The game is fine. It's not very difficult and the game is very slow. There's limited ways on speeding it up and producing intermediates mostly just feels like busy work. Yes making scissors to get a 25% bonus on x is fine I guess, but its a whole building to do just that. Among some other recipes. I think aesthetic builders would like this game but the strategy and tactics isn't there or interesting compared to something like timberborn where it's quite hard to survive and you're the only reason you can't not some random tax bill. Ultimately it is a game that appears to reward time investment, I just couldnt get hooked on it to warrant spending said time. I enjoyed it, but I would not have bought it for the price.

I want to like this but there are some baffling design choices and so many traps for new players. - All early reseach is locked behind one resource, and all industrial production buildings are similarly gated behind one resource. So every game goes pretty much the same way. There's no alternate paths to take to making a successful colony, or interesting corners to explore. There's one optimal path. There's nothing really interesting about the research process or the tech tree, it's just a lazy mechanism to make the game take longer. - Buildings or systems that are actively bad. Rafts, claw statues, etc. You can see new players commenting on how bad they are and asking if they are working as intended, and you get an occasional response from a dev or experienced player which amounts to "yeah, those are bad, you're not supposed to really use them". Ok, so why do they exist in the game? There's a difference between "bad, but good enough to get by until you get an improvement" and "so bad that actively choosing to use them is a trap for new players". The second category should not really exist. A lot of things don't give you explicit numbers on how they work until your have sunk time and resources into researching them only to realise that they are a useless dead end. - Everything feels slow, you end up playing a lot on max speed and it doesn't matter at all, except that it makes the visual effect of the constant bad weather annoying to look at because it's sped up. Research is so slow, and takes so many resources. - Inconsistent behaviour of resources and buildings. I can instantaneously move some buildings from place to place as needed. Cool. Other buildings can't be moved. Is it because they have goods stored in them or workers associated with them? Nope, apparently it would just make the game too easy if behaviours were consistent across the whole class of objects. When you pay taxes, resources can fly through the air from any warehouse to the ship. Cool. If you knock down an old warehouse, the resources in it will be moved to another one, right? No, they just permanently dissapear. Oh. You want us to use the logistic system to empty the warehouse, I get it. But then why not use the logistic system when paying taxes, rather than just arbitrarily in one case and not another? Once you get through all the pitfalls or arbitrary design weirdness there isn't actually that much to do. The 'events' (pirate 'raids', smuggler visits, claw tax ships) are as predictable as clockwork. Nothing really changes apart from the number on the tax bill going up.