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To make matters worse these rewards are chained together in a haphazard fashion, meaning I have to fish up 10 treasures and plant 25 trees (amongst other things) if I want to obtain a pickaxe upgrade, because the ability to find money in holes in the ground (raise your hand if you've seen that one somewhere before) and craft the bronze axe are the two unlockables directly before it. One of the requirements for the mining hat is to change my clothes 15 times, for some inscrutable reason. Unfortunately these vital items and bonuses are disguised by unhelpful silhouettes in the merit menu, making it difficult to know what to prioritise, and there's not always a clear line of cause and effect between the work and the reward. Many of the tools needed to perform these tasks are acquired through "Mayor Merits"-small groups of repetitive chores I'm free to tackle at will. It's quick and convenient, but at the cost of the one thing a game like this should value most: Allow me to busily do nothing, to exist in this space simply because I can. In Hokko Life, the entire sequence takes about five real-world minutes. It's something that needs to be learned about, gathered for, and crafted, before finally being placed somewhere sensible for the community's benefit. I thought it'd be a real relief to spend time with a wholesome life sim that didn't force me to sacrifice specific chunks of my real life to play it… and then the game asked me to build a bridge, and I immediately understood why Nintendo's series insists on slowing me down.Īs in A Certain Other Game, a bridge is a major feature granting access to empty village space on the opposite side of the river. The game ditches any ties to a real-world clock and uses a sped-up internal one instead, so a quick nap can fast forward an hour or two, and some serious snoozing can make an entire week pass by in a few button presses. The character creator is straightforward yet flexible, with a good variety of skin tones and hairstyles (all fully colour customisable) available for your entirely genderless avatar to use.
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Reviewed on: i7-10750H, RTX 3070 (laptop), 16GB RAM, SSDįor a brief moment, Hokko Life does feel like it has some potential.
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What is it? Animal Crossing: Unofficial PC Edition
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