Cozy Tales

Heyho, I really like this game. There's a big open world, with lots of interesting quests, and a very interesting new quest system, which I personally haven't experienced before. A brave decision, but I like this system.

The animations and graphics are nice, especially for such a small game, and I particularly like the voices of the various characters in the game world. I really like the walking and running animation, the animal jumps forward, which is jerky, but this way of moving and the corresponding animation feels very smooth and clean. The main character is very cute. Each character has their own voice and story or quest that goes along with their conversation. I have the feeling that there isn't a direct story, at least it didn't seem that way to me, but rather that various small and short stories are told, and you often interact with the environment via quests as well as small mechanics such as fishing.

I like the UI, it's okay. The main menu is simple and clear, only the two buttons at the bottom right and the one button on the lower left are a little irritating, they are very different from the rest of the main menu. First of all, I had to search a bit before I discovered the settings. The background is yellowish, the buttons are also yellowish, they don't stand out enough. All in all, a nice main screen. The pause menu is good, but it's confusing that you can't press “ESC” to go back to the settings menu and pause menu. The UI in the game is kept simple. A more interesting font would have added to the overall style, but the default font is very readable, which is good. The music and sound effects are not too loud or quiet, and they also fit very well with the corresponding UI processes or character actions. I also like the logo, it really incorporates all the big factors that the game offers, the tail of the animal and its color, as well as the green for the world and a compass for exploring.

The game's performance is tolerable, but you can't play on higher settings unless you're happy to settle for 20FPS. (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080, AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, 32GB RAM, NVME M.2 SSD)

I have learned that the game contains AI works. Since the game is non-commercial, I have little issue with this and it's nice to know that AI helped this small project, certainly it created novel workflows that the team had to deal with. It would definitely be fair, however, to put some kind of note somewhere describing that AI was used and for what. And it would have been way better adding such important disclaimers before launching.

Thanks for reading.

Due to transparency concerns regarding Ai usage I have already voiced, I find myself unable to support this product. I am sure that the assets that team members truthfully and genuinely worked on are of high quality. However, due to the  blatant usage of Ai on the itch page and in game and the team failing to mention this fact, I can not be sure how much or how little of this game has been ethically produced.