LogFAQs > #980052391

Still feeling some tension in my head and shoulders. I need to keep myself distracted so I don't feel bad. We've got an air purifier, so keeping that running for some background noise helps. I'm starting to see why my dad always has a radio on in the background at his house. Games are obviously a good source for this, though I'm obviously not in the mood for action games at the moment. Apparently the human brain stops maturing at 25, so of course my 34 year old brain isn't getting many of those happy chemicals from games anymore, even before I had any hints of my mom's failing health.

Recently I've been playing Coral Island. It's a Stardew-like farming game that also lets you clean up a trash-infested ocean floor. It's the best Stardew-like I've played, but still not as good as Stardew. It takes longer to build up money, and there's less forage along with no special forage events. Also don't like how using the scythe consumes energy, since that means you can't prioritize clearing out the bushes from the farm first. There's less overall ore nodes in the mines and the amount of rocks that are likely to spawn a hole to the next floor are much smaller.

I do like how you can slow down the game clock so you can get more done in a day. Like, you spent a day clearing out trash from the ocean, then you still have time to run around town, grabbing forage. The clock also doesn't seem to affect processors, so you could squeeze out extra productivity from them. You also don't need items in your inventory to craft items. As long as you've got the right resources stored away on the farm, you can craft the appropriate item on the spot no matter where you are. You can choose to exclude certain chests if you have rare resources you don't wanna use up.

I also like how they handled shops. The map lets you bring up a schedule of every shop, so you can tell from a glance who's closed or open at the time. You can use a shop's services as long as they're open, even if the owner isn't behind the counter. The map also keeps track of the NPC's locations, and you can track down specific characters through the relationships screen.

Overall, I like the game, but it takes too long to get going.