izigame.me

TL;DR - The game feels and plays like an unfinished pre-alpha, so much so that even $20 feels like asking too much.
I like this genre. I like this genre a lot. I've been playing these games since Harvest Moon 64. Story of Seasons, Rune Factory, and Stardew Valley. I've put hundreds of hours across dozens of titles on various platforms. They all tend to be very comfy and chill experiences, usually quite charming, and are highly polished. This game however largely falls flat on its face, when compared to its more established brethren.
Right off the bat, the game is technically very poor; or in other words, it is janky as hell. This is where the game's 'pre-alpha' feels largely comes from. While the game does technically work, it seems that at every design question the decision was made to favor development expediency over a quality player experience. Let me explain...
You are in third person. Okay, third person games are a dime a dozen. What does and does not work, and the expected norms of how a character and the camera react, are well understood. This isn't the PSOne/N64 era where everyone is still experimenting and trying to figure out how to do this stuff. These problems have been solved, we know what the baseline should be. This game fails to clear that bar. It feels like something from the PS2 era (and that is being generous). The camera is locked behind the player at nearly all times. So when you stop and rotate the camera around the character, you won't see the front of the character, instead the character just rotates to keep their back to the camera (and with minimal to no animation while they effectively spin in place). Now if you have the character walk towards the camera, you will see their front, but as soon as you let go of the movement controls, they instantly snap their back towards the camera. Again, that's weird and clunky; it's just not how characters and cameras react to each other by modern standards. Also there is no jumping, but it is possible to fall down from some ledges. Guess what? There is no reaction animation for that. You can walk off a ledge and fall a few meters, and your character reacts the same as if they'd walked across a flat surface. There is no buckling of the knees or anything to indicate they had just fallen through the sky, there is simply no reaction. If you were still in development and this is how the character and camera worked while the game was in the prototype stage? Fair enough. But for a supposedly finished product? It just doesn't cut it.
Objects will pop in and out of existence, with little rhyme or reason. Trees up on a hill or in the yard will disappear as you back away, but not the farthest ones away. Only some of them will disappear, while those that are both closer and farther away remain visible. This can happen to buildings as well. There is no lower-poly version that it swaps places with. There is no fading or dither effect to hide the otherwise super obvious pop-in. You'll just be walking across your yard and notice your chicken coop vanish in the distance (and by distance, I mean between 50~100 meters).
One of the game's gimmicks is the vacuum backpack, used to suck up garbage and water. It can then also spray the water out like hose, and you use this to water plants and wash animals. For starters, there is no real physics. Pieces of garbage will zoom towards you as you get close if you are actively vacuuming, but it's not like the game is simulating actual suction. Nothing reacts to the suction or the water. Blades of grass and plants aren't perturbed by it. Chickens aren't bothered and don't care. Even the garbage react more like it is magnetized to the player itself, rather than the vacuum doing anything.
Likewise the water hosing is also lackluster. The water spay itself is just a series of sprites, and not even good ones at that. It flies out in a simple arc, and basically disappears once it hits something. Again, what is the fastest and simplest way to do water? This is it. A single emitter firing off a series of the the same sprite in quick succession. The water doesn't make anything noticeably wet, it's has no part in cleaning up any of the garbage, it's not even formed out of polygons. Super Mario Sunshine had better looking and more interactive water back on the Gamecube. I know that was a mainline flagship Mario title, but it was also 20 years ago; middleware development tools have come a long way, and we should expect better. Again, this would be acceptable for a pre-alpha or something on the 'to be fixed' list for an Early Access game; but that's not the case here.
Menus, while looking okay enough, often bug out. You will complete a quest and get a popup for the next quest, but when you close that notification you'll find that there was another popup for the completion of the prior quest hidden behind it. Those are clearly being displayed out of order. While again, it does technically work, and you can continue on about your day, it is once again indicative of the complete lack of polish in this supposedly 'final' product.
Technical problems aside, I really think the game's very premise is poorly implemented and horribly underused. Supposedly the world has become such a garbage heap, that people are emigrating off planet. This conjures up images of the garbage strewn wasteland Earth from Wall-E. As a purely hypothetical premise, that's an excellent starting point. There is opportunity there not just for your more typical farming life gameplay, but ecological repair and terraforming. From how far I was able to get into the game, it apparently does nothing with it. Outside of explaining why the farm is covered in piles of garbage (instead of weeds, trees, and stone like in a more traditional game), that's all it does. You drill hard piles of garbage to break it up, then you 'vacuum' up the piece. You then deposit them in a magical grinder machine that turns miscellaneous refuse into materials.
Once the garbage has so simply and easily been removed, do you need to do anything else? Nope. Grass is perfectly green under all that garbage. The water is perfectly clean, clear, and ready to be used. The intro sells you on the premise that the planet Earth is an ecological disaster largely abandoned by humanity, but all you need is a shop-vac to make things right as rain. There is no ecological disaster, there is no underlying damage that needs repaired.
Not that the game needed to do this, but it is a huge missed opportunity. There was the potential there to do something unique and stand out. But again, they just did the most expedient thing possible, and turned the garbage into a less interesting version of clearing trees, weeds, and rocks. They couldn't even make the cleaning engaging. There are entire games built around cleaning stuff (e.g. PowerWash Simulator). It could have been fun, but it's not.
Also, you can't customize the protagonist. Having a custom avatar is a staple of the farming life genre. I don't have any problem playing a lady (when given the chance, I actually largely prefer the fairer gender), but if you're gonna lock me into to being a specific character (and give up all the otherwise fun customization that goes with it), you gotta make it worthwhile. What is the player getting in exchange for giving up customization? In a game like Subnautica: Below Zero, you're getting an interesting mystery narrative that pushes you to explore the world. So ideally this would be because the dev team wanted to tell a very specific story and put a lot of effort into a strong narrative. This game does not have a strong narrative (again, it largely ignores its own premise).
So yeah, given how incredibly unpolished and janky this game is, I cannot honestly recommend anybody plays this over just replaying Stardew Valley or any Story of Seasons title.
I did however think the chicken hats were charming, and I appreciated them.