Playtime: 5 hours (3h normal and 2h cheat mode)

Played: 2026

Context: This combines two genres i'm interested in but are rife with bad games.

Review

The nicest thing you can say about Havendock is that is unlike any other farm life sim or survival crafting game. You start out cooking seawater to desalinate it and eventually you can make drones and magic potions. Seagulls, parrots, mice, etc. will help you move goods between creation and processing spots. There's also scuba diving and a submarine.

Aside from that the game has a variety of mechanics like character creation, a skill tree, rotating traders, random villagers, some exploration, etc. You can save freely, you can set completely custom parameters for games (like disabling needs) and some other things i'm probably forgetting. They're really trying to do something here, this isn't some lazy Stardew clone or Steam Greenlight trash.

Unfortunately, it also has major flaws. The biggest one is that automation just doesn't work well, despite it's extensive options. One of the main culprits is storage. Each storage box can only hold 4 different goods, and there are dozens of goods. Another problem is that cooking stations can only be set to a single recipe (for automation). The result is that villagers will just leave pumpkins on the farm while starving. And many other stations also have to be interacted with manually to function properly. Villagers can only be assigned to one station too, increasing this problem.

The wonky automation hurts especially because this system of goods production and processing is the core of the game. There are only a few lines of dialogue/story and there is basically no exploration. Because of the limited space you're not going to want to decorate either, so you're just constantly running around an ugly pier shift/ctrl-clicking on grills and stuff. It just isn't fun.