The post Pine impressions: Crafty exploration in a pretty world first appeared on Killa Penguin.

Pine‘s Steam store description explains that it’s an “open-world action-adventure game set in a simulated world in which humans never reached the top of the food chain,” but it’s difficult to get a sense of what that means in practice. I’ve spent almost two and a half hours with Pine now, and it’s looking a bit like a mix between the exploration/crafting of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the keep-multiple-factions-happy simulation mechanics of something like the Fable series, with the former elements being most prevalent early on. Your first steps in Pine can be overwhelming as you’re inevitably ganged up on by numerous factions that you’ve done nothing to warrant aggression from. Still, there’s an inherent pull to exploring a world as pretty as this one that largely counteracts a lack of polish in the camera and combat departments.

You play as Hue, a human who begins the game living in a remote village on top of a dangerously unstable mountain.

This isn’t a sustainable existence despite the elders’ insistence that the world below is too dangerous to be a part of, though, and a series of events compels Hue to take off and begin figuring out this strange and unfamiliar world to carve out a place for his species. There are several existing factions of characters such as crocodile people and fox people who already occupy the world, and your relationships with them increase and decrease as you offer them needed resources.

I’m finding it useful to keep relationships a tick above “hostile” because it keeps dangerous factions from attacking you on sight. Combat isn’t Pine‘s strong suit, to say the least, with its floaty animations and unpredictable camera making each encounter significantly clunkier than it probably should be. Your dodge feels like it never covers enough distance. Sometimes, striking an enemy causes them to simply disappear from your view as they’re pushed back in a single frame, effectively teleporting in the middle of combat. Meanwhile, the camera has a talent for clipping into foliage and blocking your view, which can make responding to changing circumstances unnecessarily difficult. Pine‘s combat is just weirdly uncomfortable.

Fortunately, there’s also a lot of exploration and crafting. Picking up various materials and then crafting them into traps, equipment, and usable potions can feel rewarding. Doing so while the world is cast in a orangish-pink glow as the sun sets is downright magical. You can’t climb in Pine, but most slopes can be methodically ascended by jumping (much like how climbing works in Skyrim and other Bethesda games). There’s also an energy meter that ensures that you have to find food and eat with regularity. While I initially suspected that this would be a burden, it’s served as an impetus to explore for semi-hidden orbs that can be used to increase the size of Hue’s inventory, allowing you to carry more food around.

Two hours in, Pine is incredibly charming. It takes a little while to get going, and I’m not confident that I’ll ever get used to its combat, but the number of positives far outweigh the negatives. Exploring is a joy, and I get the sense that I’ve barely scratched the surface of its mechanics.