Core Keeper
I knew from the first time I saw the trailer for this years ago that I was going to love it. You start in an underground chamber next to an ominous glowing statue with nothing. You start mining your way into the darkness heading towards some sparkles and discover copper. A few hours later you're armed to the teeth, hauling your latest loot back to base where you'll refine metal, cook some more food and attend to the farm. This is taking the best vibes from Stardew & Terraria and putting them in a really well polished game with building, crafting and boss battling. It's very addictive and progression is great. My only real gripe is inventory management.
Pros
- Tiny detail, but when you mine - you can aim at the walls 45 degrees around you, not just the one immediately 90 degrees to the side
- Lighting is really pretty. Torches flicker, walls obstruct torchlight
- There are different character backgrounds for starting skills (not a big detail, but a nice touch)
- Nice background music
- Combat feels really good
- Similar world / character system to Valheim where your worlds and characters are entirely separate
- There are skill trees
- You can craft from adjacent chests
- Interesting set pieces to find out in the mines like puzzles, races and secret rooms
- Pets, which have levels and talents (and some gear interacts with them)
- Great progression system through ore
- Electronics and lighting system for bases
- Farming, using seeds from plants out in the wild
- You can capture wild animals and build pens for them. They all have different diets like bugs or farm crops
- In 1.0, they added a mechanic where you always move forward after mining a tile, which means you can mine with one hand holding down the mouse now. It's a small thing, but you're going to be mining a lot, so it's nice to be able to eat/drink at the same time
- There's a huge amount of freedom in how you build and customise your base. Floors and walls can be dug up and moved, tiled, painted etc. Set pieces can be picked up from the world and moved into your base, there are lots of different lighting sources etc. Everything in the game exists as an object that you can pick up, move and use as decoration
- At release, they also changed separate floor and wall chunks to a shared material and increased all the item stack sizes
Cons
- The point of Early Access is to balance the game and fix bugs. The devs added two new classes (Magic and Summoning) on release day. Magic and Summoning are completely unbalanced and not worth playing at all, which is a shame. They feel like an afterthought.
- Crashes on Steam Deck
- Small number of bosses
- The later ores have basically nothing you can make with them; it makes it feel like the end of the game was rushed to meet the 1.0 release date