Dinkum

A little slow to begin with but there's a lot of satisfaction and fun seeing your town grow bigger and customizing the layout. If you have the patients, get to the 5 inhabitant milestone and the game should open up to your preferred play style. Hopefully a pass is done on the beginning of the game to help streamline this before 1.0 release.

In many aspects this game is superior to the "original" game that defined this genre, except for one thing; I really would like a mode for real-time. I understand why that is probably not possible, but I still have fond memories of playing the "original" and experiencing the seasons change in real-time. The dungeons are a huge upgrade. Lots of customization and collectibles.

A genuinely well thought out and well made game by a developer that truly cares. The visuals are great, the game play is fun, and the game is truly a joy to play!

remarkable game can be a grind and needs more of a expansion with biomes, critters, fish, map size and animals etc but i enjoyed alot, if i had to describe it, an Australian Animalcrossing. definitely worth the 20 bucks i got it for.

I loved this game when it was first released, but combining the frustration of the mines with the last two updates, AVOID if you are looking for a chill and relaxing game. Combat continues to be increased and have added difficulties put into it, which is not the game I originally purchased. I wanted a relaxing crafting sim for a single player. The game has been increasing the focus on co-op play, meaning you NEED to have others in order to get resources you may want in increasingly challenging areas. This was not the game I bought. At this point, I won't be playing it again.

amazing game if your looking for an animal crossing style of game i did notice the Ai behavior of the paper wasp is a little wonky though when it lands

This is the game I've been wishing for. Every update is better than the last. Aesthetically pleasing but not overly chibi or saturated in colour. Not a very complex social system but I don't think the dev is going for that anyways. I do wish there were steam achievements, there is however an in-game achievement system in case you're looking for the satisfaction of completing a checklist.

This game will keep you busy. It does seem to take forever to progress but that was probably because I just did what I wanted to do at the beginning and wasn't as concerned with building relationships with the characters and doing the daily duties. The days are very short and it is a tad stressful trying to get things done which is kind of stressful and not a "cozy" game vibe. I also spend a lot of time on the internet trying to figure out how to move things along as it isn't very clear in game.

The game feels like it doesn't encourage me to engage with any of its gameplay. It wants me to grind 75K to progress to more content. I try crafting an item, worth 700 per item. I try cooking a meal, 375 for 4 meals.

I'm told the best way to make money is trapping animals, fishing, or bug catching.

But why isn't more effort rewarded with more money? The economy makes no sense.

And besides that doing any of these things is not fun. It takes 10+ seconds to mine a single thing. In every other game it would take 2 seconds. The game is more intent on wasting my time than giving me fun.

Play Littlewood. That game constantly gives you a positive feedback loop for literally every single thing you do.

Great game excellent world you might need some gaming experience first because there is not much guidence
but overall 10/10 game love it!

I love this game it has everything, farming, mining, decorating, landscaping, and fighting!!!

I've been playing Dinkum since day one and love this game. I don't regret buying this game I have 899.9 hrs on record as of writing this post. James has added so much to this game and more will come.

This game is the perfect mix of Minecraft and Animal Crossing with its own little twists and charm. I'm loving it so far and can't wait to get more into the building and decorating!

Great game. Fuck john he cheats in the bug competition.

Was bored of Counter-Strike and other FPS games. With bored I mean that I got stressed out all of the time when losing a round or against a cheater. It was not healthy for me to pursue that game anymore.

Switched to Dinkum, I really felt much more peace behind my pc.

The game in itself gives lots of options to do things. Just fun in itself to play in your free time.
One flaw is that I can not play it on my macbook. When outside I would like to have the option to play it on my laptop too.

Aside from a few glitches this game is far FAR better than I expected it to be. I just came off the back of playing My Time at Sandrock which was brilliant. and this game is surpassing my expectations for it being a segue game till I was able to find something decent to play. Very enjoyable.

I am absolutely in love with this game. There is so much content and so many things to do that it almost feels like a constant grind just to reach to next thing to unlock, build, or do. I love this! I would definitely recommend this game to someone who enjoys animal crossing and other farming/comfy simulation games.

Dinkum is an AWESOME game!! Its a cosy town builder, with lots of decor options and the ideas and possibilities are endless. If you like hunting there's lots of fun and scary creatures and weapons to use, not to mention the mines! overall a really awesome game that involves a good grind and deffo worth the money

GF and my first building game (outside of DST) it's a more casual DST with enough content to keep you going for a while, with basic combat mechanics. Would recommend.

Great fun. Relaxing . You will spend hours playing and not know it.

This is my all-time favorite game. Period. I have never played a game with a more receptive developer, willing - and eager - to listen to suggestions from the community. I do play other games, but I ALWAYS come back to Dinkum.

If you like games like Animal Crossing then this game will be worth the time to play. Extremely well done especially to only be one dev ....really fun game to play

This game is awesome! Me and my fiance have so much fun playing this! I work on resource gathering and tech upgrading, and she explores and has started raising chickens on a farm. There's so much to do in this game, and I have still yet to uncover LOTS more to this game! 2nd day in a row playing this, and I've sunk at least 10 hours into this game already! <3

This game is Stardew Valley + Minecraft + Animal Crossing: New Horizons, set on an Australian island. If you love those games, you will adore this one.

Dinkum is a crafting simulation game, with a heavy emphasis on crafting. The game focuses on the player rebuilding a town on an island. Doing so requires the harvesting of a variety of resources from all over the island, and the slow accumulation and stacking of those resources to create bigger and better objects. It’s the fairly standard crafting game formula, and it works decently well here. Dinkum provides a range of biomes to explore, resources to collect, and creatures to interact with. These are all based on native Australian counterparts, which I quite enjoyed, giving the game a unique and delightful flavour. In addition to the usual crafting incentives of wanting to gather the resources to make better gear or to complete construction on a building, Dinkum also provides the player with daily quests that they can use to get extra money, reputation, or permit points, which they can then use to upgrade their skills. Everything and every mechanic in Dinkum is a process of slowly building, stacking everything to try and reach some very distant apex.

Dinkum helped me finally put my finger on why I dislike crafting games so much. It’s that grind, that slow build, that reassurance that both the apex and the journey to get there are worth it, when they’re really, really not.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3334913096

To understand why Dinkum specifically helped me understand what I dislike about crafting games, it’s helpful to share an example of what the process of adding one building to my town looked like. The premise of Dinkum and all the marketing videos on their Steam page highlight the towns players can build, and the freedom of urban planning players can execute, so it’s worth understanding what it takes to actually get to any of those points.

The first building available to me was a general store, which was great, because my inventory was generally full, and it was nice to be able to sell things. Acquiring the store required first befriending the shop keeper, which took me two days of running errands around the island. These errands were hunting down a specific insect or fish - flies popped up weirdly often - and bringing it to the shopkeeper. Errands complete, the shopkeeper decided to stay, meaning I had to buy a land deed for the shop. Building the shop required planks, nails, and tin. While I could craft the planks and nails, I had to scour the island to find the tin in randomly spawning trash barrels. This took another three days. Tin acquired, the shop began construction, a further two day process. Its completion then placed the town 75000 coins in debt, which would need to be repaid before any other buildings could be built. “Aha!” you might say. “You have a shop, though! You can use that shop to sell things and pay off that debt in no time!” You would be correct about the mechanic for repaying the debt, but be sadly mistaken about its ease. Selling my various bugs and trinkets and shells to the shop netted me a cool 16000 coins per day, meaning I should, in theory, be able to pay off that debt within five days. However, collecting resources to sell requires tools, which degrade and break, and must be purchased to replace. That 16000 coins per day rapidly whittles down to 10000, taking tool replacement into consideration, and assuming all I’m doing is focusing on making money. I was not focused on making money, as the aforementioned inventory size limited how much I could collect to sell, instead splitting my time being money and crafting progression. After fifteen days, I was no less in debt, with no real ability to progress anything until that debt was paid.

My character fled her capitalist dystopian hellscape only to end up captured by another. Sixteen tonnes, and what do I get? Another day older and deeper in debt.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3334913579

Dinkum being a grinding game is, of course, by design. Crafting games as a genre generally require some degree of grinding, be it through repeating an action or rummaging through the same spawn points day after day. The problem with Dinkum is that the grind is the game. As much as it touts the town building and what can actually be crafted with the various resources, those crafted objects do very little to mitigate the grind, just change it. Once I craft animal traps and higher value objects, that doesn’t change the debt cycle and need to scour the island for a rare resource that I can’t progress without. It just refocuses and recolours it. Gaining reputation with the various villagers and doing quests doesn’t give any extra depth to them or your relationship to them, instead just granting an item. The process of building a town is a prolonged one, even by the standards of crafting games, and becomes a tedious game of repetition with no real reward but those the player concocts for themselves.

And then, the game itself will fight against the player’s self-set goals using the mechanics themselves.

Dinkum uses a 3D model approach to its game design, which is fine in theory, until coupled with its system of having interactions take place in a square grid section, ostensibly in front of where the character is facing, but realistically, in some random place somewhere near the character’s face. Having an interaction spot be a square isn’t an issue until coupled with a camera that doesn’t always accurately display where the character is looking, and which can provide a misleading perspective on what the character is about to interact with. This means, for example, that the camera and my character’s body suggest a butterfly is in my interaction square. However, when I actually use my bug net, it turns out I’m nowhere near the butterfly, and have wasted one of my bug net’s uses. As a one-off, this is easy to laugh off as my little character being a klutz. When it happens again and again, it makes the grind inherent to the game that much more annoying.

Coupled with that is both the unintuitiveness of some controls with the over-accessibility of others. Left clicking is the default control for taking an action with whatever the character has equipped. Planting seeds, then, intuitively ought to involve left clicking to dig a hole with a shovel, equipping a seed, left clicking to plant it, and left clicking to bury it again. Instead, the player needs to use q - a button not used for anything else in the game - to plant a seed, with the game giving no indication or ability to remap this button. It’s a baffling design choice that illustrates the general obnoxiousness of doing most things in the game. There are either far too many steps for what needs to be a streamlined activity, unintuitive steps, or a general inability to focus interaction on what the player is actually trying to interact with. For all the tedium of the grind mechanics, it’s the addition of clunky interactions and poor control design that finally made me recognise not only why I dislike crafting games in general, but Dinkum in particular.

I’m not interested in battling camera angles and controls to collect one of a hundred identical objects in an inventory too small to accommodate them. It’s just not fun, and there are better uses of my time.

There’s an undeniable charm to Dinkum. It’s dedication to its Australian identity is delightful, and the idea of forging a new community on an island far away from the horrors of the world is always a wonderful one. Everything about how Dinkum executes on that idea, though, highlights how much good gameplay is needed to sell a good idea. The very design of Dinkum is a slog, and I had to immediately leave its charm behind.

If you enjoyed this review, please check out my other reviews and my curator page. Thanks for reading!

This game is so fun and has so many possibilities! i wish they would add more biomes such as artic containing super floppy and cute seals and polar bears along with orcar BRR!

The coziest PC game I have ever played. Developer is very talented. Would like to see a more polished audio and color palette

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☑ 9
☐ 10

---{ Author }---
☑ https://vojtastruhar.github.io/steam-review-template

If you love farming and building/arranging your own world, you will love this. I love it so much and cant wait for more updates in the future. Thank you James for this lovely awesome game

An excellent blend of the things that make Animal Crossing enjoyable with the timeframe of Stardew Valley rather than real-time. Though it lacks some of the charm due to having human villagers rather than cute animals, it more than makes up for it in fun and accessibility.

There is always something to do on any given day in the game and you'll often find yourself stuck in the mindset of "Just one more day" as you do with any good game like this. Throw in the fact that the multiplayer works fantastically well and it's an easy recommendation for anyone who likes either Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, and especially if you enjoy both.

Relaxing (for the most part). Minimal fighting but can be tough for the alpha animals. Simple farming and animal raising while building a town. I like how the NPC's can give you a bug catching, fishing, foraging, crafting or cooking task everyday to get extra rewards. Fishing and Bug catching gets easier with level up and unlocks multiple new items.

The game is awesome, really love everything about it but combat sucks. On multiple separate plays(over a year ago and now) with and without mods(mods make it better but breaks the saves on some) was unhappy with the very basic combat setup they have. No block, dodge/roll, run, armour/hp based on equipment(cosmetics only exist), avoid/evade in a system where you can die from basic mobs that have a slightly higher attack speed and knock back while you smile and wave to die. Will give it an easy plus once fixed.

WOW the options is endless with this game. You can play at your own speed, would highly recommend.

10 outa 10 would recommend. It's Animal crossing meets Stardew Valley meets Minecraft. Love it.

In a world with a bazillion farming/life sims, this one does it right, and scratches the itch. If you like games like Animal Crossing, you'll love it. Occasionally, it does feel like a bit too similar to animal crossing, but mostly, it actually feels better to play to me. It has gameplay elements that animal crossing doesn't have, and some things they have in common, Dinkum does better.

Mostly fun, I like the graphics and the ability to craft a lot of stuff. I also like the colorful houses and flowers in the game.

Love Dinkum! It's very Animal Crossing in Australia but with light combat and some other unique features. Super enjoyable and addictive multiplayer or solo. Really like that you can do a lot of things at night after the day ends and there's no need to rush to sleep before the day completes. Can't wait to see what else they add to the game!

This game is quite literally a mix of Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley and Minecraft. It's genuinely one of the best games I've seen, and is genuinely criminally underrated. If you have liked any of the three games above PLEASE give this game a try. Most features you may find annoying have mods out there that fix them, and I need this game to blow up so I CAN INSTALL MORE MODS.

I'm like actually obsessed and I'm so beyond happy I gave this game a chance. (P.S. pls let me romance Theodore)

The Best way to describe it, is Streamlined Australian Animal Crossing New horizons.

It has less charm than animal crossing though it has it's own sorta Australian vibe, But I will freely admit it's less charming.

But on the other hand it has basically everything else from AC:NH and a little more

It has the same sort of game-play loop of collect resources to build and maintain tools to make structures, As well as collecting various Flora and Fauna to sell for money, slowly building up your town which you are given free reign to design as you want, doing tasks to earn points to unlock further mechanics, It adds in a lot more focus on things like farming and cooking which a deviation from AC:NH and the range of decoration isn't nearly as diverse as AC.

But on the flip side everything is faster, hours of collective game time aren't lost to unskippable scenes where you hold up the 100th White butterfly you've caught, those typical stand up and show off the bug/FIsh I got scenes to the camera is instantly skippable, in general everything transitions and moves faster so you feel like you can get a lot done in a short amount of time. And most importantly of all: YOU CAN SLEEP TO SKIP DAYS!

I highly recommend this game to anyone who likes the general game-play loop of Animal Crossing New Horizon but always felt like it was a bit too slow paced and tedious.

very good gampelay and graphic
but need more to do like , better bgm and still much bugs
also need more complex game interactions

Super Cute! Really fun cozy game
Runs with no issues but fan does kick up a gear during game play
Awesome, large, open exploration map, feels far larger than similar games (animal c, harvest, season of, stardew)
NPC Characters are very likeable and fun, slang used is super funny and sweet especially for aussies familiar with it ( will be entertaining to look up for others)
Very excited to continue playing and expand on an already great games