Letters to Arralla

Slow, boring, and tedious. It was kind of cute and I liked the facts you can find around the island but I was still bored.

I wish I could be a turnip with bouncy bum cheeks in every game!!! Letters to Arralla made my heart happy. I love opening everyone's mail and helping them with their problems. The island is a good size for a game this length; I enjoyed wandering around and rarely used the fast travel system. By the end of the week, I had the lay of the land down. It really felt like visiting and getting to know a place! It's the beginning of autumn where I live, and this was a perfect way to send off summer. I'd love to visit again next year!

Feels janky as hell and poorly tuned. Yhere are like 10 houses total on the island, so the central delivery mechanic isn't ever really something you feel like you're mastering, rather every clue was pretty much dead simple OR completely obscure. The ability to ask the postmaster where everything goes also kinda defeats the fun. for a game that's 100% about walking places, it's really wild how bad the movement feels. There are a few "twists" that I thought were fun (and included the coolest character, who only appears for like 2 scenes). Overall it feels like a comic at an open mic that stumbles on-stage, gets a good laugh out of their first two jokes, but by the end of their 5 minutes they're just kind of mumbling setups and payoffs completely disconnected from each other. I also really don't like a lot of the character designs, including the protagonist. It feels like they were going for incredibly cute, but to me it came off as more bland than anything else. Giving everything butts I think was supposed to be cute, but it just gave a lot of characters a kind of bulbous look. If this was a student game I'd be cautiously curious about their first full game, but as a commercial game I really didn't connect with this.