Video Game Review: Seeds of Resilience

Seeds of Resilience

Subtle Games

Strategy Simulation

Nintendo Switch

Seeds of Resilience is a turn-based survival colony sim about a group of castaways shipwrecked on an island.  Using the natural resources provided by the island, you are tasked with providing the group with the food and shelter needed to survive.  Each day you are given a number of work hours for each survivor, and you have to use the hours well to harvest resources and build tools and structures that will allow them to keep going.  Providing better quality of life for the survivors will give them more work hours in the day, while forcing them to go a day without proper sleep and food will cut down on their available work hours, and eventually kill them.  As you progress, your survivors will become more proficient in skills such as survival, fishing, woodworking, ect., which will open up newer and bigger structures.  The end goal of survival is to build a ship to escape the island.  There are also various missions that involve completing a specific objective within a set day limit, such as building up a stockpile of food or building a certain structure.

Unfortunately, this simple concept is bogged down by a huge amount of flaws, especially in the menus.  The UI is a complete mess, with a player needing to constantly check a huge number of different menus to get all the information needed to make sure you take the right steps.  The icons and items are extremely tiny and easy to miss in the menus, and instructions and information are often confusing and bogged down with strange grammar issues.  If you aren’t opening up every single possible menu every three minutes, you will likely make costly mistakes.  It gets to the point that I feel like I’d be having the same experience by playing Papers Please.  It’s made more frustrating by the abysmal loading times and bad framerate.  A single day often takes so long to load that I start to worry the game is frozen, and just pulling up the build menu can lead to bad lag.

But that’s not where the issues end.  The gameplay itself is monotonous at best and frustrating at worst.  The game only offers a tutorial for the earliest of gameplay, after which you are completely on your own to figure everything out.  While I understand that having to learn for yourself can definitely be considered a plus, this game takes it to the point that you can find yourself soft locked a year into survival mode because of a mistake you made on day one.  The game neglects to explain important factors such as how if you pick all the cattails on the island, they will not regrow and you will be without a source of valuable straw in the future.  

Even more frustrating is the COMPLETE lack of any automation.  If you want to task one character with collecting berries, you will have to manually click on each individual berry vine one by one (but you need to make sure to hover on each one long enough to get the popup telling you what you’ll get.  If you accidentally click on a bare vine, you’ll waste a valuable work hour for nothing).  The survivors lack any AI whatsoever and depend entirely on you, as a matter of fact, they are not even visible on the island itself after the initial landing cutscene.  Hand collecting each and every single solitary rock, branch, and leaf you need to stay alive is an extremely unpleasant way the game artificially extends its lifespan.  The game is cute, simple, and a good way to kill an hour, but until it receives a large number of QOL changes and a huge optimization patch, I cannot in good faith recommend spending money on this game.