izigame.me

I really didn't want to give this game a negative. I forced myself to play on, waited patiently for updates (took >8 months btw) but since I tell my friends not to buy it (yet) irl, I guess that counts as a non-recommendation.
CI is a huge waste of potential and could've been the next stardew. The art and world setting is incredibly beautiful, and as someone from SEA I really enjoy seeing the mesh of indo culture in the game, but the praise ends here. The biggest problem with this game is BUGS. Bugs, bugs, a crash here and there, more bugs. Was their programmer hired from wish or did they come from an entomology degree? Who knows?
I bought this game before the 1.0 release back in Nov 2023 but seeing as that they'll wipe your files I decided to wait for 1.0. To my surprise the mermaid content (which is literally in the screenshots on the store page btw?) was totally non-existent in the "full" release. Ppl defended the devs saying it was never part of 1.0 and was "always" part of a later update/roadmap. That's where all the "incomplete" reviews came from. But well never mind I am only interested in mermaid stuff, so I waited. 8 months passed and I'm way past refund deadline. 1.1 is finally here in July 2024. Super excited; dove right in.
Gameplay wise it's your typical farming sim. Crops to sell, cows to feed, villagers to romance. A lot of things follow SV's format to the T. The harvest fest where you have to bring a crop to put into the huge crock pot, the inane mining format that unfortunately got popular thanks to SV where you have to mine rocks until you find a rope(stairs in sv) down, and every 5 levels you get an elevator. But there's a lot of unique SE-asian mini games in other seasons for you to enjoy. Oh, they give you sprinklers early, which I love, but no one tells you using sprinklers do NOT give you farming points apparently, so you'd be in year 3 with your farming level still at 5/10, but I digress.
The characters are ok. The writing is pretty mid ngl and half the time I have to fight the intense urge not to hit the Skip button. I am the type of person who usually romances (if possible) or max out all relationships with every character just to read their story, regardless of gender and this is the first farming game I legit wasn't sure if I could put myself through this. Quantity > Quality is a great way to describe the writing. Here are some early heart events: You help carry a sofa because someone is moving. You watch 3 people get into an argument that has nothing to do with you. Dude broke the library pc. Dude has daddy problems. Another dude has rich daddy problems. A girl complains. Some of these are completely unnecessary to split into 2 heart then 3 heart events and could've just been squeezed into a 5 heart, then 8 heart event because the early heart ones are a serious waste of time. I got to get up for work irl tmr and I really don't care that your shoe has a hole in it bro. Btw, there's NO divorce in this game so be careful who you give that heart knot to.
Anyway, you can put crops into machines (mayo maker, aging barrel, bee hives for honey, etc), but the machines break EVERY OTHER DAY. They literally just stop working. The crafting bar is full but you cannot pick up your produce or remove it. If you look this up in the discussions there's hundreds of threads dating back 1+ years about this. It gets worse the longer you play it so it's definitely some kind of memory leak but everyone refuses to acknowledge the possibility their game was programmed by a blind man and his puppy stepping on his keyboard. If you ask/beg/pray for a fix, CI's keyboard warriors will run to reply, "Just restart your game." or my personal fav "The devs can't reproduce the bug." As if that's an answer...? So if you're going to buy this game, be prepared to restart it after every other day. If you're totally ok with the devs not respecting your time, you'll enjoy this game.
Here's more: The chest you put in your barn to store the milk pail/sheers & hay has disappeared completely. You post asking for help. The reply you will get (from the same few people) is, "Well you shouldn't have put a chest in the barn." Then why tf did the game allow me to and why did the chest work for 3 days?? Oh and if you put fences touching the barn your fences will also disappear. The answer to that was, "Leave a space." lol.
Another one: "Bug: Quests or altar (bundles in SV) don't accept different/mixed quality of the item." The reply: "Well don't donate mixed qualities." While you might think hey this isn't a bug it's a feature, why are you complaining about this? Picture this: You are now in year 2 and most of your items are gold~osmium quality. You finally get the other 4 pieces out of 5 to donate, but it won't go in because previously you put in ONE bronze quality in yr 1 so now you are STUCK with all bronzes. How in the world are you going to find bronze quality now? But apparently this is OK and a "feature" and we should all just stop bullying the devs.
....You get the idea of the kind of stellar replies from the community. But what about the devs? Well they reply maybe once every 2-3 weeks, if at all, and they'll copypasta reply "Send us your save file and a video of the bug and what you were doing before it happened." as if everyone just sits around recording their 200 hour intense crop watering sessions. If you don't, well, oopsie, we can't reproduce the bug. The game was working perfectly fine BEFORE a patch but is suddenly stuttering and lagging after it? Well the answer was, "Lower your graphics quality" or "What card are you on? You need a good GPU to play this game." (as if it wasn't working fine before the update..) "4080" No more replies.
Tree planting event was working fine before a hotfix (which they had to upload 2 more hotfixes to fix their hotfix, and they broke automatic chests along the way, just sayin') but now you will faint and lose all your tools. "We are aware. Just get your tools back from the blacksmith." Ok great, what about my sword? "Just buy one." This is one of the first few events in Spring btw, and the bug affects mostly new files/new players, who have NO MONEY. The problem is all these people replying and shielding the devs have like 400 hours in the game and are way past all of these issues when they affect you the most. If you have high stamina and 5 mil gold then yeah, you won't faint and lose all your tools so this isn't a problem at all. These are the same people who are active on discord too so the devs basically live in an echo chamber.
I personally experienced 2 crashes in Spring year 1 alone, then later had some weird bug where I could NOT interact with anything, so I literally couldn't sleep in my bed and I fainted. I restarted the game/day and it went fine so I just continued, but a in-game week later the same thing happened at a different location/time. Reported it, and got the "Send us a video" from the dev and a "What other apps did you have running while you're playing the game?"
Everything wrong with the game is some how your fault. You shouldn't have done the thing. You shouldn't have listened to youtube while you play. You shouldn't put chests in the barn. Express your unhappiness in the discussions? Get clown badges and whiteknight replies about how the devs are poor widdle babies, never to be blamed. (And yes pls do give me more on this review to prove my point.) "Hey my bug from the last patch wasn't fixed." "I bet you didn't reply to the devs." ..I literally got a reply like this. LOL bruh.
I tried my best to like this game. I really did. It would've been so good. The thought about how they royally blew their 1mil dollar kickstarter (convert this to Rupiah & you'd have AAA game level of funding btw...) and this is what they came up with is just painful. Maybe hire more staff including one who can actually program, 6 testers, and a CS. See you in 4 years. Hopefully that's enough time to fix this mess.