Everafter Falls (PC)
Jun. 1st, 2025 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWhen you get hit by a truck, it turns out that Earth was all just a simulation and you actually live on a floating island called Everafter Falls with a bunch of animal people (and a robot buddy!) who have peace, prosperity, and very minor drama.
Another Stardew Valley-like. This one dispenses with any hand-holding in favor of forcing you to figure out and discover your order of operations. Everything is “gated” by something else, but the game isn’t big on telling you the order to do things in. Also, it starts in Summer rather than spring and has 30-day season with no weekdays. There are “cheat sheets” for the various crafting machines posted on store walls, but it’s annoyingly difficult to figure out how to make some of the materials or where to find the ingredients.
Virtually nothing, on the other hand, is gated by either season or location, but that’s not actually great for the completionist, because it means that there’s no way to increase the chance of anything spawning, and there are a decent number of items that are so stupidly rare I never saw them at all. I couldn’t finish the cooking recipes partially because of a mushroom that the description claims is common but I never got. I almost completed the aquarium (I think I was missing two fish!), but there’s nothing you can do besides “fish a lot” to get any fish you miss. The museum requires a dozen insanely rare rocks—by lategame I was opening 20+ rare stones each day and I only got two of them. Similarly, shells spawn on the beach or you can force spawns with a shell extractor, but there are half a dozen insanely rare shells that I never saw either. (Apparently there’s a sidequest item that increases the spawn rate of fish and shells you don’t have, like the “epic terrarium” that always spawns a critter you don’t have…I just didn’t play long enough to get it.)
The one really standout feature is that any item you haven’t put in the museum appears with a star in your inventory. Because the museum is otherwise really annoying: You need to manually put donations into their display cases, and the “bundles” that win your prizes are organized by type of item, not by anything related to how you get them. So growing every summer crop and gathering every summer foragable fills a quarter in each of half a dozen bundles. In practice, you’ll fill a handful of easy bundles early in the game, and then in the late game you’ll end up swimming in museum credits you don’t need…but still only have half the bundles complete.
You get a pet who carries some of your inventory, substitutes for the hoe and watering can tools, and assists you in battle. You can also get a flying drone that can be upgraded to do many of the same features (and is the only other way to increase your carrying capacity.) You eventually also can get a pigeon friend and pixie friend that follow you, but they do very little.
There’s no heart meter for the villagers or romance options, you just watch their interpersonal dramas play out in cutscenes by doing their quests; and for a game of this length there are very few of those.
Staying up too late or dying in the mines (a series of procedurally-generated dungeon rooms) makes the “Spookies” come get you and force you to sleep soundly that night. The equipment system scales very quickly (your sword multiplies your attack power, which you can upgrade with potions or accessories) which is good because combat is a muddy affair of repeatedly swinging at small enemies that zoom into your space and are often hard to distinguish. Once you get good at catching and deploying pixies, you no longer need to actually mine in the dungeons and can race through them; this is also good because once you beat the final boss, the dungeon access is completely lost until you build the insanely-expensive “DungeonVR” chair.
The most important tip I’ve figured out is to use your first two museum credits on the Master Key, which allows you to open all of the Community Gates (and chests without needing other keys) and gives easy access to a lot of trees. The second is to learn to use pixies, because they’re your best source of rare wood, shards and rare stones (geodes). The third is to grab a pink bee as soon as you can (eventually there’s a quest that gives you one for free) because pink honey is the game’s best moneymaker. Get a few bee hives with a single pink bee and three regular bees in each, and put a rainbow pixie on your juice extractor, and you’ll be making three pink honeys each day and never have to worry about money again.
I ended up playing about 55 hours to get nearly everything and complete the “main plot”. (After you uncurse the fifth rune and unlock the Sacred Tree area, that’s very clearly a postgame area with special bonus items to unlock…but you also need to do all of them to 100% the museum.) I absolutely got my money’s worth. But my last big complaint? My final two achievements didn’t pop. Which is why I didn’t play another few weeks to try to get the “all giant lotus flowers” achievement or summon the aliens again so I could get all the stuffies.
Overall: If you play Stardew for the villagers and the romance options, there’s much less here than usual. If you play it for the completionist aspects of discovering all the different items and craftables and don’t mind occasionally needing the wiki because something is too obtuse, you might also have a good time.
Another Stardew Valley-like. This one dispenses with any hand-holding in favor of forcing you to figure out and discover your order of operations. Everything is “gated” by something else, but the game isn’t big on telling you the order to do things in. Also, it starts in Summer rather than spring and has 30-day season with no weekdays. There are “cheat sheets” for the various crafting machines posted on store walls, but it’s annoyingly difficult to figure out how to make some of the materials or where to find the ingredients.
Virtually nothing, on the other hand, is gated by either season or location, but that’s not actually great for the completionist, because it means that there’s no way to increase the chance of anything spawning, and there are a decent number of items that are so stupidly rare I never saw them at all. I couldn’t finish the cooking recipes partially because of a mushroom that the description claims is common but I never got. I almost completed the aquarium (I think I was missing two fish!), but there’s nothing you can do besides “fish a lot” to get any fish you miss. The museum requires a dozen insanely rare rocks—by lategame I was opening 20+ rare stones each day and I only got two of them. Similarly, shells spawn on the beach or you can force spawns with a shell extractor, but there are half a dozen insanely rare shells that I never saw either. (Apparently there’s a sidequest item that increases the spawn rate of fish and shells you don’t have, like the “epic terrarium” that always spawns a critter you don’t have…I just didn’t play long enough to get it.)
The one really standout feature is that any item you haven’t put in the museum appears with a star in your inventory. Because the museum is otherwise really annoying: You need to manually put donations into their display cases, and the “bundles” that win your prizes are organized by type of item, not by anything related to how you get them. So growing every summer crop and gathering every summer foragable fills a quarter in each of half a dozen bundles. In practice, you’ll fill a handful of easy bundles early in the game, and then in the late game you’ll end up swimming in museum credits you don’t need…but still only have half the bundles complete.
You get a pet who carries some of your inventory, substitutes for the hoe and watering can tools, and assists you in battle. You can also get a flying drone that can be upgraded to do many of the same features (and is the only other way to increase your carrying capacity.) You eventually also can get a pigeon friend and pixie friend that follow you, but they do very little.
There’s no heart meter for the villagers or romance options, you just watch their interpersonal dramas play out in cutscenes by doing their quests; and for a game of this length there are very few of those.
Staying up too late or dying in the mines (a series of procedurally-generated dungeon rooms) makes the “Spookies” come get you and force you to sleep soundly that night. The equipment system scales very quickly (your sword multiplies your attack power, which you can upgrade with potions or accessories) which is good because combat is a muddy affair of repeatedly swinging at small enemies that zoom into your space and are often hard to distinguish. Once you get good at catching and deploying pixies, you no longer need to actually mine in the dungeons and can race through them; this is also good because once you beat the final boss, the dungeon access is completely lost until you build the insanely-expensive “DungeonVR” chair.
The most important tip I’ve figured out is to use your first two museum credits on the Master Key, which allows you to open all of the Community Gates (and chests without needing other keys) and gives easy access to a lot of trees. The second is to learn to use pixies, because they’re your best source of rare wood, shards and rare stones (geodes). The third is to grab a pink bee as soon as you can (eventually there’s a quest that gives you one for free) because pink honey is the game’s best moneymaker. Get a few bee hives with a single pink bee and three regular bees in each, and put a rainbow pixie on your juice extractor, and you’ll be making three pink honeys each day and never have to worry about money again.
I ended up playing about 55 hours to get nearly everything and complete the “main plot”. (After you uncurse the fifth rune and unlock the Sacred Tree area, that’s very clearly a postgame area with special bonus items to unlock…but you also need to do all of them to 100% the museum.) I absolutely got my money’s worth. But my last big complaint? My final two achievements didn’t pop. Which is why I didn’t play another few weeks to try to get the “all giant lotus flowers” achievement or summon the aliens again so I could get all the stuffies.
Overall: If you play Stardew for the villagers and the romance options, there’s much less here than usual. If you play it for the completionist aspects of discovering all the different items and craftables and don’t mind occasionally needing the wiki because something is too obtuse, you might also have a good time.
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Date: 2025-06-05 05:38 pm (UTC)