Garden Story and Humankind

Of fruits and men...

Garden Story

This cutesy action RPG has you playing a fruit who is called to the service of guardianship against the night time appearing rot monsters that threaten each of the four seasonal themed villages in your grove. Easy controls and nice art make this nice to get into, but doing random quests from a board and grinding out money for gear, and then wrangling inventory space for said gear gets old fast. Ironically a victim of the Epic free games scheme because on its own I probably would have played more of it, but given a choice with a steady stream of things to try sorry - this one is left to rot.

Humankind

This civilization building game starts you out as nameless tribes in the Neolithic era and then as you collect "era stars" (which varies by era: in the first one its simply exploration and then moves to military or scientific achievements) and once you do you can progress to the next which lets you pick a culture to adopt which gives you specific bonuses. The Greeks are good at science, the Assyrians good at raiding and so on. While there are lots of systems running here none are immediately overwhelming thanks to the easy interface.

That is until you get to the "city cap". If you go over the city cap you start taking deductions that you might not even notice which can send you into an untenable position. A simple warning screen would have been nice. Eliminating enemy empires can also turn into a game of whack a mole (if you go via the conqueror route which I'm sure is everyone's first game :P) as they must be wiped out to the last city, outpost, and unit from the map which can feel unsatisfying - especially as that last unit will probably be hidden on one of their allies lands.

Still a decent game that I ended up playing more than I thought, even though its a type of game I generally dislike but yes, there are some nasty surprises that might catch you if you aren't looking out for them.