Crest - an indirect god sim

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Possible of Removal of this Game

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1096090/eventcomments/591759268792830008?snr=1_5_9_

[quote]
... This means Shallow Waters or any ECS games will not happen ...
... Our games will be online for now, but we don't know for how long ...
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Get it while you can.

I was super excited about this concept... and pretty disappointed in its execution.

It feels less like "talk to your followers and have them interpret your commandments" and more like just trying to play a buggy city builder where sometimes the wrong thing happens. These "interpretations" don't feel meaningful in any way, you're just having to babysit the commandment list to delete the ones that go wrong.

Game was buggy and laggy. The "bring a city from zero to full faith" objective never registered after I'd gone 0 to 100, the save function stopped working, and the connections between cities disappeared after the tutorial and never came back. Thankfully this last didn't really matter much except for one objective about making cities hate each other, which I completed by... not paying attention to it and it doing it on its own. The level of challenge here is pretty low, so it's not satisfying when you complete something. It's like doing basic math while someone screams the wrong answers at you: more annoying than anything.

Tons of "gameplay" components that didn't really affect the game in any way: the underworld I visited once and never again, the water maps could be ignored because the environment didn't seem to really matter, most of the skills tree can't even be unlocked, resource levels and city relationships just really don't matter to completing the objectives... it was a ton of tutorial for very little that actually came into play.

Completed all game objectives (besides the ones it bugged out and didn't register me as completing) in 4.5 hours. Have no real desire to play again.

This one did not work out with me at all. Let's try to find out why.

Pros:
- I like the minimalistic, african-style graphics very much
- I also like the concept of "talking" to your believers through a system of words that you have to unlock during the game
- The UI is mostly intuitive to use, if maybe a bit crowded with notifications at times
- and yes, I do like building games and god games, so everything should be good, right?

Not exactly.

The cons:
- it took me less than 10h to completely play out all there is to the game, except for some of the achievements, because
- some of the in-game tasks might be impossible to achieve. For example, if there are only 2 hippos in the world and your followers slay them without you telling them to, you can never achieve "have an old follower slay a hippo". Meh.
- the framerate drops from 60 to less than 20 so quickly that the game becomes unplayable very fast. With about 100 followers, the game is stuttering like hell and is no fun any more. Take a look at "Kingdoms and Castles" to see >800 inhabitants and thousands of ressources being handled smoothly
- the completely useless "underworld" features hundreds of "dead souls" that might give you some interesting tips in the first 30 minutes, but after that they just drag on the FPS and are nothing but a nuisance
- the whole game feels unfinished at best. To be honest, it feels like the dev-team had tons of ideas that just didn't make it into the game when they approached the deadline and realized their game does not even run smoothly yet.
- saving a game takes ages. I mean really, it takes up to a minute and more to just save the game! This cannot be necessary. Again, take a look at "Kingdoms and Castles" for a reference here.
- the game has at least one severe bug (the word filter pops up out of screen) which I reported but got completely ignored. Thanks for nothing. If you pump out a buggy game AND neglect your players, you are actually asking for negative reviews.

Whatever the reasons, this game feels like a beta-version at best, not a full title.

(+)
- beautiful graphic
- feel very polished
- the idea and gameplay are unique and fresh
- no bug or crash so far

(-)
- the gameplay was very fun at the beginning, but when your world has become big, problems will arise and make the game become a hassle and annoying

- your commandment will miss-interpreted by your followers alot ... and the bad UI will make you tired and dread because of it. I cannot hold it anymore, only with 3 cities and 3 hours of gameplay, I have felt exhausted in the inside ... the UI and notifications make it very difficult to track what has changed ... and this make the game become repetitive fast

- the tech tree is randomized and branched. You can only choose one branch and discard the other ... often this will result in an impossible scenario where you cannot make advancement in your civilization at all ... because two very important tech are branched in the same place, make your civilization halted forever ... sometimes a very basic but vital tech are placed in the end of the tree ... make it almost impossible to advance

overall : 3/10 ... sadly I cannot enjoy this game because of some mechanics

Crest is a nice, hands-off approach to the god game genre. While other games may have you toss followers around, strike them with lightning, or do some other supernatural display of power, Crest has you lead a civilization indirectly through oracles and priests.

Essentially, you give commands, but it's up to your middlemen to interpret what they mean. This can (and usually) leads to unforseen consequences, such as your command of "make more food" leading to a city to overhunt all of the antelope on the island to extinction, when what you intended was for them to just start farming. Sometimes this is irritating, especially when there's an obvious food shortage, but other times it can be interesting or downright hilarious.

Over time your civilization will spread and divide itself into separate city-states, all of which will develop their own cultures, and in turn, their own interpretation of who you are as a god. One city may come to view you as a god of nature, and thus interpret that "make more food" command as "farm more" or "pick more berries". Another city might come to view you as a god of death and war, and thus interpret the very same command as "cannibalize the neighbors". Yet another might stop believing in you entirely, and thus ignore the command and do their own thing, for better or worse.

Your civilization will never progress past the Iron Age, which is unfortunate, as watching it grow and develop is a major part of the game's charm. If the devs ever decide to do a sequel, or add in DLC, I'd love for them to change that.

If you're the type that loves to sit back and watch simulations, or just want a casual experience, I'd recommend Crest.

Its... Okay... Thats kinda the problem.

You start off with a single location with followers and the ability to use 2 commands. That tends to be "gather food" and "make babies". Make babies is important as you get screwed over very easily early on. Note that even in easy mode, this game is hard at times and if you can't gather metal, you might as well start again, it leads to a dead end. Once your first town is 4/4 big at least, you need to push migration, finding a new town. The trouble is the command will result in followers following between the two towns. Once the new town is at 4/4 and the old town is at 4/4, with each having babies available, you then got to push to create another town. And you have little choice... At 2 towns it can go wrong.

By the time you have 5 towns... Everything falls apart.

Expect at least two locations to start fighting - you really can't stop it unless you get lucky and their towns with chilled factors towards other. But it sadly takes only 1 and you might as well start groaning. Old towns can be repopulated so a destroyed town isn't the end of the world, you just have to let nature take its course. If you can get at least 2 towns on your faith, great. But chances are, by the time 5 towns are at play you will find it impossible to not get at least 1 that refuses to comply to your will. In addition, the followers will be constantly misunderstanding your commands, making it impossible to give out good advice for them to follow. "Make babies", could easily change to "eat followers with babies" for example. So you have to constantly either re-issue the command and pry it lasts long enough, or save up to get rid of the reasoning the followers are changing the command to.

Pushing followers to find towns on other islands takes a while and several wars... Not there yet, mostly because no matter what by the time I've gotten to a certain point, my rivers dry up and I loose my jungles and 9/10 the terraforming command is useless. Choose your teachings wisely as well. focusing on food and baby making seems to be the best over walk speed and building speed. The followers will *eventually* do everything, but you get royally screwed over by a lack of young followers if not careful. This is particularly true when the cities go to war and towns are slowly wiped out.

So far my worst play was a game wherein all I could produce was two cities and nether was near metal... So I got stuck at 2 towns unable to produce anymore. This is how important metal is and you can't "win" without it. You only need a single town and your in luck, the metal will be traded to all other towns. Encourage trading, alliences, etc.

Your starting town also needs to be cool with migration and making babies, otherwise prepare for a long wait. A town that doesn't care much for reproduction almost always kills itself. Especially if hit by a double whammy of "we refuse to migrate/trust anyone". A town with refusal of both will produce it if you command it, but you risk loosing faith and thats bad. ultimately, every island becomes a wasteland and the jungle dies so... Don't feel bad, the games odds is against you. If the river doesn't dry up, it just dies anyway.

Good start, but I cannot reccomend, yet.
It's a fun game with a very interesting premise. You issue commandments, and your followers generally do what you say.
Generally being the keyword. Followers tend to be really dumb, which is probablythe point. Additionally, they will reinterpret your commandments through random word associations, and this often results in really negative results. For example, I once commanded that young followers pick berries. Through a bad association, they intrepreted it as kill elderly. That was fun to watch.

Another time, I commanded dessert dwellers to make babies, and it became starving people make babies... but no one was starving. SO you have 2 options, spend 20 influence to undo the association (whcih is ALL your influence you can store) or issue the command again, knowing it will be changed... again. Tedium at its finest.

The graphics are what they are, simple yet fun. The music is pretty spot on, and there really isn't "sound" to speak of. Sure, there is the occasional ambient noise, or sound of people working, but really, I didn't miss anything.
The underworld is a fun concept, until later in the game where it's just the same thing repeated over and over, and your queue is 35 long.

Finally, there is no endgame. Well, there kind of is. No matter what you do, every island becomes a desert, and you run out of resources. Your people go to war, kill each other, starve, die off, stop reproducing, and the game just... ends. That's no fun at all, and feels like a cheap trick. It's nearly impossible to work through the entire tech tree, and I actually don't think it's possible to get enough wisdom points to do so.

So, it's a fun game, a simple time waster, but ultimately with no endgame and no way to unlock all tech, a futile effort. Maybe the dev will build out the endgame a bit, remove the world-wide drought, and make wisdom easier to come by. Until then, put it on your wishlist and pass for now.

I have played a little bit of this game, and I must say I like it. It's a very strange concept, and can be frustrating as hell at times, but that's likely what it would be like being a God and not being able to directly communicate with your idiot followers.

This game is unique, and I can't really say I've ever played any games similar to it that didn't have you take direct control of your followers in some form or another. The idea of the game is that you're a god, but you can't control your followers. They have this pesky thing called Free Will, and they interperate your 'commandments' how ever they see fit. Sometimes this means they think you want them to eat other followers, sometimes it means something else entirely, but overall it is fun watching your little pixilated people run around killing everything around them as they try desperately to survive. You watch the rise and fall of civilization, all the while you try to guide your people to a better outcome than they probably deserve, only to watch their cities be razed by others, or die off because they don't like making babies. Overall, this is a fun game.

The enjoyment I get out of it is watching the civilizations rise and fall. It makes it fun watching your glorious jungle civilization rise to the heights of their power, only to one day become dust in the pages of history. Then you get to watch the jungle reclaim what was it's territory before the touch of humanity, and the animals return. I see a lot of potential with this game, and I hope they keep expanding it. What I'd love to see are some other civilizations (maybe on the other islands), who don't follow you as their god. Maybe even have it so that the people can sometimes migrate of their own free will, and those become 'rogue' states that don't believe in you, and have it so that believers can control multiple cities. It would be fun to have islands going to war with each other, with each one having many, many different cities under the same banner. Would make for some seriously entertaining stuff, IMO. Would also be fun to have more than just one setting for land - islands are fun, but it would also be fun to be able to be on a continent rather than just islands.

This is likely not a game for everyone, but if you're into coming up with your own story and they bad graphics don't send you running, you'll enjoy this game. Just need more imagination than just what a game company comes up with, and it will provide a lot of fun

Very unique concept. Makes me think anthropology, linguistics, evolution. Really great indie game I don't recommend stuff normally so...don't take this lightly xP

I want to like the game but there are two things that just kill it for me.

1. There is no real point or goal to try for other than keeping cities under your ifnluence. There is no story, nothing to accomplish except to encourage people to spread and try to keep them from eating each other or turning against you.

2. The command system is interesting, but the people decide on their own interpretation of your commands sometimes and that feature could really use some work.

Each command goes like this:

Who is going to act on the command
What they are going to do
Who/what they are going to do it to

The problem is there are many more ways to indicate people than anything else. So when the cities come up with their own interpretation of your commands the target for that new mostly randomly generated command very often winds up being a group of peeople. It was nearly inevitiable that this would cause my cities to decide that when I told them to hunt deer, what I really wanted was for them to take up cannibalism.

To me this feels like a game that should still be in early access, working the kinks out and adding features to make the gameplay less monotonous.

Context: I've followed this game from Early Access, and only bought/played it after release.

This is a difficult review for me, because whilst I do like this game, I don't like playing it after a while. And I can't for the life of me figure out if it's the game or myself. So I'll put this game as a tentative 'reocmmend', write my thoughts down, and hopefully they can help someone else.

So, the good things:

The concept is pretty new and fresh, with the idea of giving commandments to your followers to do things, and it being up to them how to follow it, and what associations they make from it. The AI appears to be capable enough to look after itself without your intervention, and only rarely does things that seem out of the left field (even when they decide terraforming's a great idea for some reason, you can kinda see the logic there).

The aesthetic is gorgeous, and really needs to be seen in motion to be appreciated. It's low-poly, but not in a bad way, and visual cues are fairly obvious. The music and sound is also excellent, and one of the few games I didn't want to play a Youtube video in the background.

Now, unfortunately, to my issues with the game.

I don't know whether I'm missing the point, or I don't actually like playing indirect sims, but the lack of information the game gives me is actually rather frustrating.

There are options to turn on help with making your commandments (such as telling you the effect a completed one would have), but there is little to no information with city/follower needs in regards to how I affect them. I know I can raise 'esteem' by building momuments and stuff, but there's no information on how. This especially noticeable with the expertise building for construction - how do I increase its level? Is it through more metal mining, because all that does is increase the mining expertise building. Or do I have to wait until that's fully upgraded before my followers pay attention to the other building? And I have no idea how to begin to build a granary. There's no 'help' system ingame like a codex that can help you figure anything out or outright tell you. The tutorial does give you the basics of what to do, but I still felt rather lost after it was done.

This also feeds into an overrall 'goal' of the game - I don't know what I'm striving for. The tutorial mentioned 'spreading my followers around', but nothing ingame or the UI reinforces this as something I have to do. Unlocking more words seems the most concrete objective I've seen, but once I have most of the animal words, I see no rhyme or reason to want to unlock anything else. My 'best' game was when I restricted myself to one city, gave basic commandments for my followers to feed themselves/mine stuff, and then pretty much left them be (influence gain also feels very slow to me, which doesn't help).

Maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe it's supposed to be a sandbox where I'm just a god messing about with my followers, discovering things by trial and error (and maybe making them eat other because I'm a terrible person). The thing is, there feels like there's a progression system under the hood, yet I don't know how to progress, and as a result, I feel like; 'well, what's the point?' In Black & White, you knew you had to take over the land by crushing/converting other tribes under your sway. Since you are the only human presence in Crest's world...there's no pushing need to do anything. Heck, as I said, you might as well just stay as a single city and be just fine.

I restarted my game several times, trying to find something to grab me, or do it 'right' this time, but each time I disengaged because I just didn't have an overarching goal I needed to hit, and therefore I hit my 'well what's the point' wall, and honestly, it's heart-breaking. I'm fairly sure this game is good, and I can deifnitely feel the time and effort and love poured into this game, but I just can't get into it.

In conclusion, if you like indirect sims, you can't really go wrong at this price point. It's definitely worth a good look, and it is charming. If you prefer more control in your games (like you can't abide the city builder Pharaoh because of the lack of control over citizens), I would tell you to give this a miss.

It still feels very incomplete. In part because the balance isn't tuned enough. You spend most of your time idling waiting for points, then you enact commandments for them to disappear in a shorter time than it took to build up. Nothing lasts, which feels unsatisfying

Great concept and a lot right, just not right enough to be engaging for any proper time.

My first session started well, but i curious and started producing counterproductive commandets like:

The old, eat the young.
Farmers, do not share with the dying.
Happy pepole, do that which makes you unhappy
Pepole in desert, Start wars with pepole in desert.

After a hefty dose of cannibalism and killings later, the cities where toppled and then the last remaning followers lost their way.

Pretty neat!

It is still rather buggy - Sometimes when you try to save and quit it will not let you actually save the game. I noticed a few spelling errors, too. Overall it's not a bad little game, but I do find it disturbing that they seem to want to cannibalize constantly - whether they "misunderstand" your commands and think you're telling them to consume each other, or if of their own free will they sit down for a midnight snack made of their neighbor. Gaining influence is a slog at times and all of your followers can become indifferent, or worse, faithless, while you wait for the next cycle.


Still, I think it shows promise, especially after it's further along in beta test.

I really like the concepts used to model this game from the ground up.
As a casual player that put a lot (maybe too much) hype in this kind of games, I've to admit that Crest is a bold and proud attempt to create something really original instead of the usual Roundabout Remakes we were so often used to.
Since Crest's description is pretty accurate and self-explanatory, I don't want to remark what you, playing as a God without superpowers, are supposed to do. Instead I will warn you: this game was announced in 2015. Still, at the dusk of 2017, this game is lacking depth and contents.
But the students \ workers behind this project proved their hard will - even with a somewhat little community, they continue to work and sweat under the hood.
I'm glad to support this kind of devs, and honored to be a backer of this brilliant ensemble of philosophy, art and - of course - fun. Maybe one day my words will decay in the dust of an another orphaned promising game, but in the while I'm going to come back in this vivid virtual world populated by shapes and sounds to become again, one more time, an indirect God that give goofy Commandments attempting to counsel well his chosen people.

At this point, there is little to do in the game. It's got a lot of potential, and is an interesting concept, but it just doesn't come together to make an enjoyable experience yet.

The developer needs to come up with a better way to handle or filter information, as it throws a lot of useless info about births and such at you. Law corruptions should be a pop up, instead of 8 happening at once and you having to pause the game and hunt them down. It would really improve game flow.

There doesn't seem to be any sort of goal to playing, and after awhile I could just let the game run itself without me even having to do anything.

It was fun for an hour, but at this point in early access, I would not recommend. Check again in 6 months to a year.

Really interesting and unique concept behind this game, and there are some things that it does really well, like how you can review all the things that have happened in your game so far by interacting with a recordkeeping demigod. Unfortunately, for me at least, there's just not enough here yet to make gameplay enjoyable.

Interacting with followers solely via issuing commandments is a really cool idea, but given that this is the central (and essentially only) gameplay mechanic there's just not nearly enough variety in the kinda of commandments you can issue. They all consist of three basic parts, essentially a subject, a verb, and an object. Without going into too much of a tangent about how this works, I'll just say that in practice there's really not much control you have, and not much you can do. For example, two of my cities went to war, and I wanted to help my initial city triumph; however since they were located on the same types of terrain and surrounded by the same animals etc, I wasn't able to issue any commandments that would only apply to one of them or the other, so any action I could take would equally help or hinder both cities.

Even when I was able to assemble a useful commandment, issuing it to the followers feels almost pointless: some cities simply ignore them, and those that are receptive will usually corrupt the commandment into something else before too long. The nature of the corruption was often arbitrarily different from the initial commandment: for example, a commandment like "those that are have metal, hunt lions" could be turned into "those that are near lions, make babies". If you have enough influence it's possible to approve or reject these bastardizations, but that seems to have little effect on whether or not they actually go away. Finally, all commandments seem to have a time limit after which they simply expire, so even the most successful commandment will be relatively short-lived.

The final straw for me at least was the lack of any real goals to strive for, in either the short term or the long term. There are no foreign civilizations to war with, and the wild animals don't seem to attack your people, so the only conflict comes from "civil war" among your followers. In these battles it's not particularly important who wins, and indeed I'm not sure whether any of my wars ever ended: the UI does not make obvious the standing between cities. It's supposedly possible to lose the game by having all of your followers die (of starvation, presumably), but even when I just let the game run by itself on max speed without bothering to issue any commandments, things ticked along just fine, with no danger of a species-wide extinction.

That is the fundamental flaw with this game as it stands right now: the player's role feels entirely superfluous, as he/she is able to offer at best only minor assistance to his/her followers, with little impact on the game world, and even less incentive to care one way or another.

My largest city starved to death despite producing a ton of food because its high priest decided to interpret the command "Give food to the hungry" as "Sail out to the sea and throw all of our food to the fish to please our god." and I didn't have the influence to stop it until it was already too late.

10/10

Now I'm not usually one to be so brutally critical, but...

'Early Access' is an understatement. This game is currently far from even playable. The game has such potential in its use of commandments and doctrines, but most of the time the player feels completely lost as they are faced with dozens of symbols and words which are given no explanation. Furthermore, the fact that you currently can't save a game is not really that much of an issue as the world you create as deity bears no resemblance to your will at all, as you constantly have to give mundane and obvious commandments such as 'If hungry, produce food', rather than anything cool or exciting. Towards the end of my second forray (the first time froze and I felt little inspiration to jump back in) I tried desperately to destroy the villages which had sprouted up of the own accord all over the small and flawed island (all the antelopes got stuck in one corner and a bit of the land was blue as if it was meant to be an ocean texture?) by giving them commandments such as 'If happy, start war'. I must admit it did give me some amount of joy to see the people rampage gleefully across the island murdering each other with smiles on their faces.

All in all I would reiterate that the concept of this game has great potential, but sadly the execution is just way off, and rather than feeling like a powerful and guiding deity you feel more like a babysitter making aeroplane noises with a spoon in an effort to get the child to eat.

I'm recommending this game not because I think you should buy it, but because I think you wishlist it and check back in a year. This isn't a game in its current state, its a simulation and not a very entertaining one at that.

First, I think this is supposed to be a critique of religion? I couldn't find any way to have positive interaction with my followers. If you leave your people to their own devices, they will flourish - farming, hunting, mining, and making new babies and founding new cities. If you do try to send out a commandment (the only way to "play"), one of three things will happen: The most likely outcome will be that your followers completely ignore you. This is the most frustrating, but its not as if the entire Bible isn't filled with similar stories. Of course in the Bible, God would punish the people in some way, while here there is nothing you can do except repeat the commandment. The second most likely outcome is that the command will be "reinterpreted". So if I said, "The hungry should eat", the people will somehow come to the conclusion that I meant "The hungry should mine.", which is annoying, but is kind of the crux of game. But the very worst outcome, in my opinion, is when the people actually listen to what you say... because they will suddenly forget all their needs and focus 110% on whatever the command was. So if you say "the young must mine", they will start mining...and will only stop once they have starved to death.

My greatest frustration, however, isn't with the fickle nature of my people, but with their lack of true culture or religion. Your proclamations aren't entered into some holy book or impressed upon a leader - they are either immediately implemented or immediately ignored, and no matter what, are erased from your "list of commandments" (and your followers memories), after a minute or two. The next generation will not be influenced by the orders you gave the previous one, except in how much food and metal your commands ultimately generated for them. The developers have promised futher development for a city/culture system, as well as an ancestral link system, so hopefully that will work out.

A pleasant diversion with little interaction from the player.

You give commandments to tell your people what to prioritize, and they mostly do so. They mine, harvest food, make babies, get flooded-out, then die. If you speed it up, a civilization takes about 5 minutes before everyone dies. The devs are completely up-front about a playthrough lasting 15-30 minutes, and that seems accurate. I assume that meant on the slowest setting, with the fastest being triple-speed. It's fun to watch, but there isn't a lot going on, at the moment. There also isn't much for you to do as a player.

If you sometimes find yourself playing a two-minute hand of solitaire while doing other things on your computer, this is a perfect game to mix up your card-matching routine. There is very little strategy and not much of a late-stage to be reached, though, so be wary if you're looking for something complex.

All in all, it's exactly as-advertised in the Early Access information, and is solidly play-able in its current state.