Reviews for Glean

[pierrecurie]

It's an overall good mining game. Changing from currency to recipe is an interesting idea, but would be better if the recipe tree isn't nested so _insanely_ deep (almost every blasted thing needed bolts/screws... but so did their other components - it would have been less grief to just cost an extra component or something). Allowing us to convert between different grades of ore saved a ton of grief, and I think you for that. Navigating the recipes was nicely done, but including an indicator of how many more screws are needed for the currently desired upgrades would save a lot of grief. The deeply nested recipe list wouldn't be much of a problem if we had an overabundance of resources to work with... but we can't afford 500 screws usually. Making screws 1-5 at a time as necessary just takes _forever_......

Finding the artifacts in a random order is reasonable, but it seems very odd that the data logs (which are assumed to be made by you) are not chronological. If you find the items in a different order, the logs should indicate that.

Losing the ability to fly was somewhat annoying, but it did cause us to develop new strategies to cope with it. Lava was an interesting innovation, but they were too annoying to empty.

The "reduce vibrations" upgrade seemed pretty worthless. It only makes getting the fragile egg thing easier, but the strange gloop it contained was worthless. I don't think there was a single recipe that made use of the strange gloop. Fortunately, it didn't seem to make emptying lava pockets noticeably harder.

For players:
1) This isn't motherload - digging as deep as possible as fast as possible will fail utterly. Almost all upgrades require special items that cannot be made before the recipe is discovered. Therefore, it will be near impossible to dig very deep. Starting strategy is to find artifact, find new planet, repeat until all artifacts at that depth have been found. There's almost always a shallow artifact slightly to the left of the starting position.
2) Because your digging capability is limited largely by heat, start with temperate/glacial. Many things only appear at certain depths - eg if you can dig to 200 on a glacial world, you may find 5-10 Ti per map; if you can only dig to 100 on volcanic worlds, you'll find 0 Ti even if the planet says "300%"
3) Upgrade costs escalate towards the end. My excel spreadsheet says that upgrading everything from 4->5 (except drill vibration) costs the equivalent of (all at the lowest grade) 880 Azurite, 826 Amethyst, 853 Emerald, 880 Ruby, 1160 Iron, 432 lava (and less crazy amounts of the other items). To save yourselves some grief, make 127 screws, 55 bolts, and 58 wireless wires. I don't want to flood this box with a complete spreadsheet, so you'll have to figure out the rest yourself, but hopefully that's a good start. (remember that this list doesn't include any of the previous upgrades!)

[FerrousToast]

to all of the people bitching about things in this game, TRY READING THE IN GAME TEXT DUMB ASSES.

To the developer, you made a fantastic, amazing, awesome, addictive game. Love the farscape references and the overall design of the game. Cannot wait for the sequel, though some features I would like to see implemented are:

1. More hazards. This could take the form of underground creatures "hot patches" cave ins, or any multitude of other forms.
2.More consumables /power ups. say using a lava glob will cause a temporary boost in yield and speed but a drop in health and heat. Or maybe a module on your ship that distills liquid nitrogen canisters you can use to cool the unit down for a short burst and descend below where the cooling unit will allow.
3.Water. You say the next game will have a diving module, well water introduces a whole host of other issues and thoughts, like for example water physics of draining from one space to the next, or reduction of the speed of heat build up to to water dispersion. also, limited light travel distance in murky water, possibly caused my fresh drilling.
4.Main map. I cannot tell you how much that little mini map frustrated me. Please, at lease put a grid on it.

so those are my thoughts on how the second glean could be even more awesome. Till then, I'll just have to continue strip mining planets. *falls into two dense rock high U formation* FFFFFFFFFFFFFUU~

[wisp4400]

its a good game but it kept pausing on me so i coudnt do anything but it would keep going so it would drill and drill and overheat....otherwise its good

[rjgentry313]

I've been playing for hours. Holy crap.

[Tamagakure]

I have mixed feeling about this work here.

On one hand, you've balanced the setting and story quite brilliantly. We, the players, recognize the artefacts since we can see them regularly, but there was no point where you neglected to keep the continuity of the character not knowing what they were. ...But, since I can imagine that since this guy's calculator has more RAM than a supercomputer, it doesn't make too much sense that he didn't figure out that the bullets went in the gun after reverse-engineering both.

Aside from that, there were nice little surprises in the game, and very inventive ideas that throw curveballs at the player that aren't impossible to catch. Such as the 'Flowers'. If you screw it up, you can make some dynamite and crack it open. I appreciate that sort of lenience, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

...However, it wasn't all so great, and that's the 3.5/5; there's still a good bit of room to improve.

To start, it is an interesting touch to make the player find artefacts as bases for new engineering parts. That's awesome. What's not awesome is making them jump between 20 planets in search of the last capsule in a particular depth zone.
I was literally stuck for 5 hours trying to find the last artefact that I needed for the coolant system upgrades, and I gave up before I found it. If it was supposed to be deeper, I couldn't survive the temperatures long enough to go looking. So a better update would be to either move that artefact up a depth level, or increase the effect of the coolant upgrades.
(I was finding capsules, but not artefacts. Kept getting metal bars that I couldn't use.)

Aside from all that, a very nice touch would be an expandable mineral map that you could access once you'd gotten the telemetries array and fired a radar pulse. Some players, like me, like to be objective-oriented, and don't particularly like scouring for twenty minutes only to find 7 Tiny Gold Nuggets. This alone would greatly increase the playability of the game, as you also can locate the special items. This idea here could also help a great deal with my above problem, and remove any need for fiddling with the upgrade settings.

Overall, I like it despite its quirks. For what it is, this game is highly immersive and addictive. You literally had me playing this all day. I'm hoping to see more from you, since you show so much potential with this single game. Hope you can make use of this.