izigame.me

I don't leave reviews. However, Necesse absolutely deserves one.

Please pardon my verbosity in advance.
I've been playing on my original Steam Deck exclusively, with the default official layout (right stick gang, trackpad is only used when required) and have thoroughly enjoyed my experience thus far. Necesse is also crazy efficient on Deck battery life, which has been wonderful for very lengthy play sessions.

So, what is Necesse?

Well, if Terraria and Minecraft had a baby... and if Stardew Valley and Rimworld had a second baby... and then, by some chance, if THOSE two babies met, and one thing led to another - what would emerge is the utterly charming gem that is Necesse.
In short, Necesse feels like somebody tastefully put Terraria sprites in a Stardew Valley world, with Stardew-style farm management and Rimworld-Lite™ colony management + building, with endless procedural world exploration.
Necesse seems to have taken its inspiration from all the best qualities of the spiritual predecessors mentioned above, and yet nothing feels out of place or particularly tedious. You can tell just about every aspect of the game was designed with the player in mind.
What if you like the appearance of wood walls over stone?
No big deal, they appear to function the same - build however you like.
What if you're one of those players who wants the game to hate your guts?
No problem - there are many settings you can tweak your liking to make your time playing as merciless as possible.
Whether a filthy casual or a glutton for punishment, there's options for just about any player in Necesse.
Even in early access, it's been a wonderful experience that I cannot recommend enough, as a grizzled veteran of these sorts of titles.
Most other similar titles feel at least somewhat contrived to me in one way or another, but Necesse is truly something special in the making.

Automation/Management, you say?

(+ Thoughts on Intuitive Design)
Games with management systems walk a fine line between ease of use, technical complexity/depth, and tedium.
Necesse's automation system, while not the most intuitive at first, is simple enough to understand without needing a tutorial, while retaining depth. By contrast, it's nowhere as overwhelming/byzantine as Rimworld's.
I've only had to look up a few things in my playthrough (only to realize I just hadn't recruited a specific settler type that lets me automate collecting a certain resource).
While it could be more intuitive from an interface/UI standpoint (early access, remember) Necesse's management system feels accessible enough for casual players, and deep enough for those who enjoy in-depth colony management with granular control over how things go in their settlement.
Rimworld almost requires granularity. Kenshi suffers without it. Necesse purrs along and simply benefits from it - if that's your preference.
For context, Rimworld is one of my favorite games ever, along with Kenshi... but I did have to research quite a bit to understand the systems and their quirks/nuances for both games - Rimworld, primarily due to its technicality, complexity, and granularity... and Kenshi, due to, well... what I'd call an "endearing lack of polish requiring players to get creative."
Haven't had to really do that with Necesse so far, from a UI standpoint, which has been a breath of fresh air.
Maybe I'm crazy, but when I play a game, I prefer to spend more time playing the game than looking up how to play the game.

Thoughtful Design Choices and Player-Centric QoL Features

I play on Normal with default settings, as I'm still on my first playthrough. Every time I've felt like I might consider stepping up the difficulty, I get slapped by something and have to go retrieve my inventory, which feels like the perfect balance to me.
To the previous point, I did savescum a lot in both Rimworld and Kenshi to keep the experience enjoyable for me and not overly punishing. However, games that autosave too often can enable overt savescumming, which can be a boon for very punishing games/bugs, but can also become a slippery slope of cheese in some games, causing you to miss out on half of the experience if abused.
Necesse does keep save backups, should you run into issues of any kind. I'm not sure if there's a native way to save more frequently than once every in-game day, but that design choice feels like a balanced compromise to make big mistakes fixable without taking away from the wins/losses of experiencing the game in full.
I've only savescummed Necesse after fumbling my Deck and banishing a settler by mistake, or learning I shouldn't keep dynamite in my hotbar while at my base... but after the lulz of discovering I should never trust a lever out in the wild, it was more worthwhile to go to retrieve my stuff than to reset that day's progress and re-explore those areas. This keeps me engaged in the gameplay loop, but also keeps settlement mishaps easy to fix, since I tend to pass more days at my base than out in the mines - so less progress is lost if I need to restore. Fair compromise.
There are countless other little technical QoL features that give the impression of truly thoughtful design, some of which I imagine could have only come from a developer having been in such a situation themselves - looking up where their autosaves are stored locally after a save corrupted, renaming a main character or world through save editing, etc.
There is even a dark mode UI window in the settings, and plenty of other customization options to refine your visual UI experience to your preferences. The settings menu is well worth a gander once you're acquainted with the game and understand what the settings refer to.

The Soundtrack

The soundtrack has some bona fide bangers, and without spoilers, the integrated ability to collect specific tracks in-world and set them up in "playlists" however you like (whether in settlement or exploring) really keeps the experience feeling fresh.
Personal favorites I've discovered so far are:
"Running," "KonsoleGlitch," "Storming the Hamlet Part 2", and "Void's Embrace." When exploring mines I keep that mf thang on me.
"Murky Mire" for in settlement, for something chill and vibey.
I'm gonna purchase the soundtrack separately, it's so good.

Early Access/Bugs

On the point about Early Access - I have only come across very minor bugs so far, myself. They were very intuitive to find workarounds for, without having to give it a Goog.
For example, on a specific repeat dialogue window, I wasn't able to re-select the same choice again. So I'd have to move the dialogue selection to the second choice and back again, in order for me to select the first choice. Stuff like that - very minor and hardly an inconvenience.
It took me 10x the amount of time to think about how to explain the issue and the workaround in this writeup than to actually figure out a solution on the fly.

** Pro tip for Steam Deck users - your right stick crosshair suddenly becoming an unbound trackpad cursor is not a bug - click your right stick to toggle back to a bound radial crosshair. **


Final Thoughts

The devs are really onto something special here, and it is evident how much thought and passion they put into this game. I can't wait to see how it continues to flourish in development. Even for being in early access, there's a surprising amount of richness and depth that makes me forget it's in EA. I'm still in the thick of enjoying it, but even once my attention/interest moves on to another game/hobby, I can already tell this will be one of those games that I revisit annually, much like I did with Terraria/Starbound for so many faithful years. I've been recommending it to all of my old server buddies every chance I get.
Well worth even the $15 full price at time of writing, Necesse is a necessity.