izigame.me

I enjoy this game. Sure, Kynseed takes a few notes from more modern life sims like Stardew Valley, but in truth Kynseed aims instead for much older, nuanced goals, the likes of which its predecessors in the Fable series only dreamed of reaching. ...And Kynseed somewhat actually pulls it off. Well, it's a lot closer anyway.
Fable was marketed as a "Life RPG", a game in which you could supposedly go anywhere, do anything, and control every aspect of your character's life as they age, marry, have kids, and die. Needless to say Fable was a very linear experience and had only a shallow exploration of those concepts. Kynseed in contrast focuses these ideas quite well. With the exception of the tutorial/prologue, you can in fact go pretty much anywhere, do pretty much anything the other characters in the world can do, and as the game progresses, you age, can marry, have kids, and die, with your next of kin taking over. While there is a loose story, the game opens up quite a bit after the prologue and very little restricts or tries to gate you in any given direction.
The level of simulation is deep in some areas and a rather shallow in others, but what is there is fun to engage with so long as you do not take it too seriously. Yes, there are some definite rough edges (for instance it is actually impossible to get a positive cooking mini-game score even with perfect timing, but more on that later), but some of the biggest gripes I read in the negative reviews seem to stem from a mentality unwilling to engage with Kynseed on a relaxed and casual level.
If you are the kind of person who takes games very seriously, the kind who loves to minmax their kit, the kind who would rather win than simply play, or who have little patience for humor, you aren't likely to enjoy Kynseed. And that's okay.
There's very little in terms of harsh punishment for failure, and by the very nature of the game being one of a lineage that goes on for 1000 years, there's plenty of room for mistakes. Built in buffers as well as plentiful diegetic hints and a cozy atmosphere (the art is eye candy and the music is damn good) really help enjoy Kynseed for the chill experience it is meant to be.
While there is certainly a lot to love here, there are also many aspects that would honestly really benefit from a little better explanation or a lot of quality of life assistance. The writing is very silly and British, at times reminiscent of Terry Pratchett or Monty Python, but other times feeling a bit flat and uninspired. It has yet to bother me personally, but I do enjoy puns and there are plenty.
For a game requiring a lot of reading, it is a damned shame that many of the one-liners you first hear from a given character are soon repeated ad nauseam by every other character including your uncle, your sibling, and eventually your spouse and children.
A much better solution would have been to limit pools of these lines by lineage, as I could more easily excuse a child or sibling repeating something a family member said. Even better if some (even basic level) variety could have been dynamically introduced to swap around sentence clauses or maybe add an interjection or a quirk phrase unique to a given character ala Animal Crossing's pet names/phrases. As things stand, it is incredibly difficult to care about any given NPC if they all say and act the same.
Speaking of family, it feels off that you cannot name your sibling (who simply goes by "Sibling") especially considering the sheer effort the narrative puts into developing an emotional connection with them. Every time you read "Sibling" it undermines it all.
I do still have hope though, as the devs have fleshed things out before (albeit in early access) as seen with the skill mini-games, and as such a thoughtful revisiting of dialogue interaction with the characters would really do a lot for a game involving this much reading (especially in the form of dialogue).
EDITS BELOW:
I had previously bemoaned the difficulty of avoiding a negative score in the cooking mini-game for Simpleton's Stew (the first recipe and one that happens to gate all further cooking progress), but it appears that within the first week of launch, the devs have adjusted the scoring to be a more forgiving. They have similarly made adjustments to the speed and cost of hired workers, which was another gripe I had. Kudos to them for taking the feedback to heart!
There are some very useful game mechanics which could really benefit from being better exhibited (perhaps through an optional quest) during the introduction. For example, there appear to be specific situations (weather, timing, etc) in which you can get a quality bonus for cooking specific recipes. This is hinted at in the game, though I haven't yet had the chance to try out the ones I have discovered.
One other suggestion I would make for the cooking mini-games is for the timer hourglasses to have some visual point of reference between them to better assist in comparing the timings of ingredients. This could be something as simple as a couple tiered measuring lines painted on an hourglass similar to measuring cups. I think this would really help with the difficulty of timing, as often the case is not that my timing ability is off so much as my ability to squint and try to mentally visualize the empty part of the hourglass before it was turned over.
Another poorly explained but very interesting mechanic has to do with traits. Beyond a brief description, there is little to no effort made to explain what the different traits actually do in practice (and less even for making apparent the situations in which they would be useful or a hinderance), which is a real shame for such an intricate system.
Considering that every food item applies specific temporary traits to the consumer and that this can apparently make a difference when applied to the player, I was hoping to see more of how these affect NPCs (whic. I was expecting at the least that an NPC's current traits would somehow affect their dialogue (and this would also really help vary some of that repetitive dialogue), but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I would love to see more puzzles or situations which could be solved with trait manipulation, but most of the time it ends up being a system I completely ignore due either to how little I understand it or how little the game cares to make me want to learn about and use it. It's not enough to simply offer the occasional quest to apply flatulence to someone for a few brass.
On the matter of the simulation systems, they work well enough in isolation, but at times do not appear to have been as well thought out when in tandem with other activities and this agitation can become amplified with day-to-day use.
When it comes to owning a craft shop (blacksmith, apothecary, etc) I still think there could be some adjustments or improvements, but they are less frustrating now than they were. One idea would be to either limit the number of daily customers or have their requested commissions be something the player can craft over a larger period of time, say a few days to a week or season depending on the difficulty of the item. You know, like how commissioning works in real life.
There are a lot of little oversights like this that really prevent this game from reaching its full potential, but even so Kynseed is still a joy to play. It is obvious there is a lot of love poured into this little gem and few other games take the simulation and immersion baked into the promise of "Life RPG" to this level. With a bit more spit and a lot more polish, I really think Kynseed can confidently stand proud as a unique title, perhaps eventually even shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of which inspired it, far above a sea of so many generic life sim "farming rpg" games.