It seems like every week there’s a new cozy open world adventure game with farming, cooking, NPC interactions, and building. Critter Cove from Gentleman Rat Studios caught my eye when I had finished the last update on a different cozy sim, and all of a sudden, I found myself five hours into the demo. Having now played 45 hours, I can say that Critter Cove is definitely delivering on its town building life sim premise, but needs just a bit more tinkering to fully realize it.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world where the water rose and knocked out most of civilization, Critter Cove follows you, the player, boating all around the world to find materials and items to craft items and build stores and structures in hopes of making the island, the best tourist destination!
The draw of this game is the detailed anthropomorphic character generator. You can go human, or you can go all the way to having a TV for a head. There are a few characters that you meet right away, there to guide or help you. Copperbottom a handy bot, Renard the Rat (who has ALL the junk you might need), and Anchor, the one legged shark who brings you to Critter Cove.
He has a fascinating backstory waiting to be unlocked as you continue finding different islands. I loved the open world aspect as far as the on-land and undersea exploration goes, especially since I’ve never played a game where the water was a main point of the game.
On the flip side, your enjoyment of the game will depend on two main things. First, how much it matters to you that the characters have distinct, unique personalities and more to say than the general chatter coded into the game. Critter Cove has multiple character personality types, like athletic, happy, and grumpy, which are all fine and interesting (though grumpy is maybe, too grumpy).
However, if when you go to the various islands after a storm to gather castaways and they all have the same personality, that can be tricky. Especially since certain personalities only want to work at certain stores, a huge part of the gameplay. Moving critters to the island also leads to them picking a house to renovate and live in, increasing how nice the island itself looks.
In Critter Cove, you’ll unlock blueprints from the tourism representative for various stores, and then have to staff them. If the critter you choose doesn’t like it, you won’t make as much money, and they’ll be mad at you. The anger is simultaneously kind of hilarious and also kind of frustrating if you haven’t yet found critters of all the types that like the different stores.
The second thing is whether or not you like going back and forth to craft items, deliver items, and then create more items. Obviously, all farm sims have this element, but there are some quests where it’s literally just going back and forth, back and forth, and when your boat is only a bathtub, that takes a bit of time.
Still, there’s a lot to like about the game, and the biggest thing is that the devs are listening to the players. When I first started the demo, and then the actual early access version, there was no auto sort, which is absolutely a requirement in games like these. Fortunately within a week, the game had been updated to fix all sorts of bugs and issues, and to include auto sort, which immediately increased my enjoyment. And for a small indie studio, all the more impressive!
The roadmap promises a lot of updates to come though! Four more locations, a questline for Copperbottom, a robot friend who helps you build your workshop in the first part of the story, the bakery, and the gym are all part of the first major update.
Super exciting, there will be robo helpers, which should mitigate some of the back and forth on crafting, allowing the player to keep exploring and work on gathering critters. (I hope boat updates are coming!!! I want a full on pirate ship!!)
If as the game continues to be developed the characters gain a bit more personality and we learn more of the actual story, Critter Cove has the bones to be a huge success. In fact, the story is less prevalent in the game, but every time there’s a new hint about what happened before the water rose, I found myself much more invested to keep playing.
You’ll see as you continue to dive all sorts of notes on the walls of buildings and other areas that either provide recipes or are writings from previous inhabitants (welp). I really hope that the next major update reveals a lot more about what exactly went on and why.
Also where the heck are these tourists even coming from?!
You can set sail to Critter Cove now!
Images and review copy courtesy of Gentleman Rat Studios
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