Paradoxical feelings

The Promise: Beautiful Realm-walking, exploration adventure. Within a few hours you collect a lot of different varieties of tier 1 goods, and then using Nightingale's unique crafting system to determine what inputs make the best swords, umbrellas, and more. It's fun and quite addicting.

The Deliver: After reaching a certain point in the game, you realize everything you've ever collected from realms is basically garbage, and the only way to get the best available materials is to play these tunneled realms followed by what feels like a Fallout invasion, but with worse enemies. I thought this game was about puzzles and steampunk beauty, exploring the wilds, growing through discovery! Unfortunately, this is not the case.

The Snitch: The game was released too early, and has spend it's entire post- Early Access launch trying to make up for that. They bent over backwards satisfying players initial concerns (offline mode), potentially delaying other concepts already in the pipeline. The Realms Reborn brought what should have been their initial EA launch and made the game much more compelling, but there's still the fundamental flaw that exploring isn't rewarded very much at all. Most treasure chests contain easily craftable widgets and collecting them only serves to clog the players inventory, which is a significant issue in this game.

The Escape: For players, it's great to get lost exploring the Realms. Playing major and minor cards and seeing what happens. Building your world. That's what I wanted this to be but instead it felt that every realm was 1x and disposable. Such a loss of beauty when there's no reason to care about it.