Vilmonic

This seemed like the type of game I'd really enjoy as a fan of classic creature sim games like SimEarth, SimLife, and Creatures, but I lost interest very quickly. The species tree was very interesting, but eventually I felt like I was just aimlessly watching the creatures wander around the screen, waiting for something to happen. There didn't seem to be a lot to discover or do as a player (or maybe the very limited tutorial and "find/create everything in a category" style achievements didn't point me in the right direction). It seems a sequel is in the works, so I'm optimistic that it could improve and expand on the things the game does well; I'll be curious to check that out when it releases.

It's.. ok. But not worth the price. I've played 1$ mobile games with more content.. Spent an hour trying to make a water creature only to realize the only plant that exists is mushrooms so fully water creatures arent a thing. The zombies are weird to say the least. Ignored them whole game and they never bothered me. Used bubbles to find some amusement when they leave the map and delete themselves by following the bubbles.. but they dont seem to serve any gameplay purpose. Theres not much to build.. It takes a long time to destroy walls and trash is annoying when trying to edit your island and it becomes flooded with trash from digging. My tilled tiles would randomly turn back to grass, causing mass extinctions of my more colourful mushrooms.
The crafting is super odd- It requires you to place the materials in exact order or it won't work. The tiles that say "Zombies love them" don't seem to be very loved by zombies at all. The large map isn't very large at all.

All-in-all, its ok. The concept is there. But really just the concept and not much else. Might like it if you enjoy super basic building on a little map, though bases don't serve a purpose at all either way. I may play more if theres more content added such as more plants, and more decorations. Don't let this review get you down any though dev, I believe you can do great things if you add more content c:

The ONLY modern A-Life game you can do a successful Wolfing Run.
For the young ones, that is a term coined by the Creatures series community, which has been on the net since 1999.
Wolfing is leaving your artificial lifeforms to their own devices for several hours, maybe while at work or sleeping, and coming back to a population that has changed, persisted, and survived natural selection factors. Mods are needed for Creatures 2's bugs but the three games can theoretically support a "wild" population of creatures without player input for extended periods.

The Sapling- It's more of an evolutionarily advantageous creature/plant designer than an A-Life sim at this point in time. They don't physically evolve fast enough to keep up with any changes in the environment. You could probably get away with keeping populations alive for several hours of top speed idling but the results would be pretty much the same as what you started with. Not a Wolfing Run if natural selection isn't a pressuring factor.

Species ALRE: crashes after running for five minutes. Pretty sure you could do it on earlier builds but this game is completely broken. (edit: dev returned, game mostly works. will still probably crash before you can see meaningful results though.)

Ecosystem- I actually haven't tried a Wolfing run in this yet. It's probably possible. The first line was clickbait.

Creatura- I don't know if I even want to count this one. The creatures don't really "evolve" except in the pokemon sense, which the player usually needs to cultivate the plant life to achieve much progress in. Plants alone don't count, sorry. Vilmonic has both.

Vilmonic- Your fungi and creatures will survive and evolve without you. You will get an entirely new population in the process. A lot of devs don't seem to understand that making artificial life more lifelike adds something to the experience. Life doesn't need us around and that's beautiful.

lmk if I missed anything.

very boring, not what i expected at all. all the creatures and plants are virtually identical, and the enemies serve no purpose.

I love trying to figure out how to succeed. I love hearing the soundtrack while I am working, on my real life work... I think I have become a fantastic fungol farmer, and I am happy... in a sweetly muted, pixelated kind of way. If you like games that are chill, come back later and see what grew, and also if you love genetics of any kind, you will be happy you have this game.

I just didn't really have fun playing this. Which sucks. But I don't get it at all. I like evolution sims and this seemed perfect for me, but I couldn't tell what was happening on the screen, didn't appear to have any way to influence the evolution happening, and didn't know what I should (or even could) be doing more generally. I did the tutorial, which taught me how to do things but none of the things the game's description made me want to do. I walked around for 20 minutes trying to dig up tech, but it was all junk and I didn't know if that was part of the bit or not so it felt useless and I stopped. I got a notification one of my monsters evolved. I went back over to see, but I couldn't even tell which one it was. That's when I stopped playing.

The more technical side of things is also weird. This feels like it was made for phones or tablets. The controls are clunky. The ability to grab items is itself an item in your inventory for some reason? That's one of the choices that's weird because it could just be it's own on-screen button if the developer wanted it an on-screen button, but it's an on-screen button in your inventory.

I like the idea of this game a lot. There may be a game here for you. There genuinely might. But I didn't find one. The idea of pixels making monsters is neat. I think that's a great idea for a game. I don't think this is that game. I do think it could be though. I think the real problem with this game are quality of life stuff. A better tutorial. I don't want the tutorial to tell me how to do everything even, just some idea of what I can be doing to progress. "Zombs are attracted to stone". Okay, what do Zombs do? They're bad, but how? In what way? Why would I want to attract them? Anything really. The tutorial taught me to move, build, grab, and plant. I wanted to play this game very badly, but I've never felt like I didn't understand a game more than here. I'm going to cut off this rambling now.

its an evolution game.
its fun for the first 5 hours.
then... its like the game likes to play by himself.
its so open ended, that it ends to soon.
the controlls are horrible i wish i could play it with an xbox controller.

playing with exporting, making and importing your own species it's a funidea but tedious in execution, having to go to windows paint and back.
also, the game never informs you how to do it, i had to read like hours of internet text to learn it.
if you like this, then try biogenesis. is even simpler (going from 8 bit to vector graphics), and the "color mod" its brillant.

BUT!
still.
for what it cost, and the hours i got from it...
i recomend it, but take in mind that still in version 1.0 it needs a lot of polishing.

Potentially great game let down by stupid design decisions. It looks a lot more complicated than it is, because there just isn't all that much variation in the creatures you can breed. There's animals and plants, but there are only a few types of each. The game advertises that "Colors have Meaning!" but unfortunately that also seems to mean that there are only as many ways to vary them as there are colors.

From what I can tell, each different pixel that your creatures have affects their behavior in a slightly different way, which sounds cool but the behaviors are so limited that it doesn't mean much in the long run. There's no way to know if a creature is confident or scared from looking at it, so while sometimes they pick fights with each other and so on, it's impossible to tell why unless you keep an encyclopedic memory of what each species does, which is hard because they all look almost exactly the same.

Summary of the growing parts: I was hoping for hundreds upon hundreds of plants and animals that would get steadily more and more complicated as the game went on. Sure, they start out as mushrooms and blobs, but I was hoping that (kinda like in Birthdays The Beginning) you'd see the final stage of evolution where there were palm trees and primates running around or something. Instead they just stay boring old mushrooms, and the animals remain as weird little bug-things.


And of course, what does any peaceful farming game about evolving your own lifeforms need? ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE! These are the epitome of the 'Godd*mned Bats' trope in TVTropes, which it summarizes as "Weak enemies that exist primarily to annoy the player character. They probably aren't gonna kill you, but they're certainly going to harass you and slow you down". While you're in the middle of breeding your little pets, sometimes a zombie will wander in and start taking swipes at you.

But see, they're like Internet trolls. If you take the bait and fight back, bad things happen to you. Specifically if you kill a zombie, the gameplay shifts dramatically. Normally there are a few zombies wandering around, but if you kill one, it goes up to around 20 zombies, and they all run straight up to you, smashing down your fences and house walls and basically anything else you made. You can make yourself invisible to them by hiding in toxic waste that you're able to spread around, and you can bludgeon them with your trowel (no really, that's your primary weapon), but more will come in 5-10 seconds and start bashing at your gates again.

Summary of the zombie parts: As far as I can tell, once you commit the mortal sin of killing a zombie, there is no way to undo it and stop their rage. It's the equivalent of using meteor strikes on your city in SimCity or Skylines - only do it if you want to create a disaster that you will never come back from.


Final thoughts: If Vilmonic was $3-5 I would say "Go for it, just be aware it's only going to give you a few hours of entertainment before you see how shallow it is." But the price they're asking is downright extortion and the artificial life is poo-quality, "read one book by a self-published author on Amazon Kindle about how to make artificial life", barely-playtested type stuff. And the zombies OH MY GOD WHY. It feels like the developer just did whatever the flip they felt like and then said "Ta-da!" and expected money for it.

Wow this is not what I was hoping for.

As I write this review I'm looking at the title card for the game, which has water, people, brick walls, a fence, and trees, and it still makes some part of me that hasn't learned better think "wow, I bet this is gonna be great". But what it doesn't tell you is that you're looking at basically everything in the entire game in that one little screenshot. It feels like a bait-and-switch to me.

I was expecting something where I could breed shy lifeforms that would get scared easy, aggressive ones that would go RAR and hunt them across the map in big epic fights, and since the game description mentions digging up lost technology, I was looking forward to a slowly-unfolding story about what happened to the dystopian world the game is set in. Or maybe they'd be special items that would open new life paths. But instead of it being anywhere near that exciting, when you dig up an old item, it just says "Junk".

And that's how I feel about Vilmonic. Junk. I normally wouldn't use such a cruel word for something that somebody put their life into for multiple years, but I haven't been more excited about a game in years, nor more disappointed.

Vilmonic starts off with a great core concept, and then you expect it to bloom and fill with variation, and then it doesn't.

Awesome! This game is just so calm, and it combines two of my favorite topics, evolution and breeding animals. Also, the fact that the fungus can evolve as well is amazing!

Terrifying zombipocalpyse game where all you have to defend yourself are tamagotchi pets and an endless supply of mushrooms!

Seriously though: it's an adaptable game. It can either be very relaxed, or quite involved, all depending on how you choose to play. I first tried it out after a long day at work and dozed off for a few minutes listening to the game noises and watching the creatures move around. I woke up and found not much had changed apart from some new looking creatures and different arrangements of mushrooms sprouting up.

Then I decided to follow the game direction. It instructs you to build some new things and have a more involved part in the breeding and the proliferation of mushrooms and animals, all while keeping the zomboids in check. Doing this I found the game can actually be a challenge.

The breeding of animals (animatrons) requires you create specific conditions in segregated little areas. Then either contain or herd the creatures you want to breed in there. It's challenging getting it set up right, moving the creatures in there, and ensuring they are well provided for with food (fungols) and water to breed.

In order to progress in crafting things, you'll need some specific mushroom color types. This can be accomplished by digging up and utilizing radioactive materials that mutate your farm, causing mushrooms to grow in different varieties. At least that's how I think I got the colors I didn't have (red and yellow) to finally grow.

Meanwhile, your mushroom patches and breeding areas get invaded by the zomboids who spaz out if you start killing their kind, and respond by altering the landscape in their own way by building little dungeons over your mushroom patches.

So, this is the sort of game you can just mess around in and let it live and transform all on it's own while you do your own thing. Or you can work to micro-manage and develop it the way you want fine tuning the farm, controlling the zomboid invasion, and terraforming the map.

Where the game could use improvement:

I don't like mashing keys. It would be nice, rather than having to tap spacebar over and over, to just be able to hold it down to rapidly dig.

Once I had built a moat around the game map, and then a wall/fence inside that, I was able to block the zomboids from the map. They would just hang out in their one-block-space outside the wall, no longer presenting any challenge. Would be nice if they randomly took down a wall if it was in their path. Allowing them to escape from buildings or get through perimeter walls to run amok again for some added challenge.

Parasites might be a nice challenge too. Fungols and animantons with a parasitic nature that try to kill off all but their own specific breed. Requiring the player erradicate the breed to protect diversity.

Intersting game though, recommend it as it is, nice work!

GGA

I love it. Seemed simple... almost too simple when I started. It has a few tools and a few types of land. I started experimenting with different stuff and found the combinations vast to procure different outcomes.

I decided to set up little cages and moved anims in to different ones and tried to breed different fugi in each. Then got into playing with the zombs and seeing what they're about and building them houses. They're not really about anything other than slapping you around if you get to close. That is one thing I'd like to see expanded on... Kind of like the mean grindles in Creatures I became fascinated with the lifeless zombs.

Now I'm playing around with a "natural" world wolfing run... Divided the land into wetland, midrange grassland and mountainous tundra and killed some zombs to see if they'd be come more annoying like it sort of says in the little help menu. Seems to be a lot different than my first zoo attempt.

Anyway, yes I recommend it! It's been entertaining to mould an ecosystem and I'm looking forward to any updates that add to the fun.

Vilmonic is an interesting game. Very retro in feel. There is complexity to discover.

My only gripes are as follows:
1 - What or where in the hell is the end goal? It seems the game is permenantly stuck on trying to survive Zomboids or w/e the enemies are, but they can spawn outside of the game screen and break walls, thus, provided dillligence to notice, it is possible to rule the entire map once you gain speed and insight on crafting.

[stirke]2 - No fullscreen support. I'm literally confused how this isn't the only game on steam that doesn't have a fullscreen mode. I don't understand the lack of it being implemented.[/strike]
* I never noticed the bottom right corner...


Again, recommendable.

It's fun, still things that are diffucult to figure out but that's normal for most games, overall it's great and worth the money it is so I'd buy it. (Though multiplayer would be really cool)

Right out of the gate I already really love this game. It uses some basic principles in evolutionary theory as the game mechanics so that is absolutely amazing. As such, I'm glad to have supported a game for such implementation. And the mechanics are very smart and intuitive. Additionally, the mechanics work wonderfully into world terraformation, where it drives you to want to build that "better" island for your critters (the crafting feeds into evolving specific strains of fungi).

That being said, it is a rather simple game. There's not a large amount of complexity to it right now. And there's not really any "reason" to evolve creatures at the moment or even work over the environment. Meaning once the newness wears off there's not a lot left there. It'd be lovely if there was something more to the zombies in the world, where more creatures=more zombies or something else to sort of spice things up and give the player some drive (or, at the very least, an option for that).

Additionally, right now terraformation is a bit too "easy." Need dry(er) soil? Just drop more dirt on the spot. Need wet(er) soil? Just dig out soil until desired wetness. What would be interesting (to me at least) would be to follow some real life here: Where colonizing species can change the environment, making it possible for other sorts of species to come in. For example, imagine you have a desert like location and you want it to be more middle of the road. You might need to first plant a species that likes dry soil, but offers "ground cover," thus trapping more water in the soil. This might offer some interesting mechanics for players as environment terraformation (and management) would be closely tied to managing and evolving species rather than just digging out enough soil for your species.

To sum

Pros:
+A fun game that captures some basic evolutionary theory
+Simple and intuitive. The use of actual scientific theory in the game is not ham fisted.
+Species conservation + Zombies + Construction = Some degree of interest. Several restarts already as I try and "build" that better island.
+LOTS of potential with this game. Could literally go any sort of way and be perfect for all sorts of folk.


Cons
-A bit too simple
-After newness wears off not a lot to keep player, well, playing. Needs more challenge/drive, even if it is just passively there. Caveat being that the game is, of course, still in development.

This game is really fun! Character customization is nice, the setup is nice. There's lots of stuff to push around and pull, and things to put in places and dig holes!

I totally reccomend this game. There's a simple charm to building things to put your anims in to breed and reproduce. If you're looking for something to chill out with, casually play, relax and enjoy, then I would definitely reccomend Vilmonic.

Would definitely reccomend playing the demo at the very least, there's a free 'lite' version of the game on Newgrounds. If you think you like it, I'd take the leap. Developer is also super friendly! Takes feedback well and seems genuinely excited to be working on the project!

Might seem simple but it's got so much going on in the background. Kind of fun to figure out what exactly is happening behind the scenes!

This game has potential but it has some issues that need to be addressed at some point.

Pros:

-very unique breeding/sim mechanics at work
-lovely pixelated graphics (this game is cute as hell)
-Relaxed gameplay
-Cute sound effects/music but wish there was more of it
-lots of secrets to find from digging
-Mixing/breeding the little monsters is addicting

Cons:

-Too many Mushrooms! Holy crap. There's just not enough options to get rid of shrooms or do anything interesting with them besides store them in a box or leave them on the floor.
-Item clutter; there are items that pop up from the ground when digging and some can't be picked up. This creates clutter on the map and there's no way to get rid of them. (Although, I could be wrong here. The tutorial is somewhat limited.)
-No vendor/trash system in place to get rid of excess items for something in return.
-Chests can be accidentally pushed around. This is a minor annoyance but it would be nice to lock chests in place if given the option.
-While the tutorial system in place covers most basics it could be expanded just a bit more.
-The game lacks more interesting stuff to craft but I assume more stuff is on the way later.

Some suggestions:

-It would be nice to know when the creatures evolve with a noticable animation.
-Maybe add a system in place that allows for a trader to come by with eggs of different species so the player can mix up their breeding?
-The enemies don't feel very threatening. Once I built a giant enclosure they were pretty much irrelevent.

This game is very different and I hope it evolves into something great. I can tell there's quite a bit of love in this project.

I give this game a mutated mushroom/10.

I like Simulation games and this is a very nice one. You start at a world with a choosable size (i prefer biggest) with a single sort of fungus and a random, quite primitive lifeform. I can can prefer underground with lots of water/swamp or it doesnt. Same is for its food, the fungus.
After a while the fungus gets (like usual farm-objects) a state of maximum fruit and tries to seed at other places around.
The animal walks around and tries to find any fungus or watersource. If it has no other needs for a while, it splits itself and generates a new instance.
For both there is chance to create a slightly different form itself. You can increase that chance by digging up some radioactive trash.
The bigger your island is, the more food you can grow, so you get big amounts of consumers. After an hour you can have about 30-40 generations and much new lifeforms. You started with a lifeform that isnt aggressive, has no form of radar/sight, is quite slow and not very hungry. After a while you get ones that are quite fast, ones with large sensors or those who kill every other lifeform. Or maybe with all that skills at once.

Your primary goal is to prevent special families of lifeforms from dying out. Its quite difficult, but if look exactly what kind of environment it needs, it is possible to keep your ecosystem diverse.

Though there are few crafting opportunities and items, i am extremly surprised from the possiblities this game has. I havent seen any bugs atm and the graphics is the right one for this kind of game.
If you relate the price with the amount of hours you can spend there experiencing new situations, it is worth it.

Vilmonic is really interesting. At its heart, it's an evolution sandbox wrapped in a thin layer of survival crafting game. You guide, or just observe if you want, the evolution of a small, self contained ecosystem of fungi and little critters over many generations. To do this, you have to find and craft various resources like tools and structure building materials. Your options for interacting directly with the creatures are limited, but you're able to observe their "DNA" and traits changing over time, complete with an evolutionary tree.

A solid base for a great game!

Vilmonic is a simple but pleasureable game.

The simple basis of 'let things be' is portrayed so well here, and your involvement - however little it is - can carry as huge or a little impact as you wish. In the end, the mushrooms and creatures evolve on their own, with or without you, and it is fun to watch them grow and change.

The little time I had with this game, I enjoyed thoroughly, bringing me back to when I used to play with games like Creatures 3 with Docking Station and Petz 5.

A calm little game, and I can't wait to see what it will become in the future...

... I'm going back to collect as many colours of mushrooms as I can.

unique and cute little game, reminds me a bit of simlife or creatures,few games out there you can play with eugenics and create your own little ecosystem,

you start on a small little island, with a few mushroom like seeds that you can plant, and a few basic tamagtochi like creatures, these have basic needs like food and water, and as long as these needs are fullfilled, they will grow and evolve over time. each new generation that is born has a chance to mutate. but the chances are low, unless radiation is involved.

as you change the island by digging and forming it the way you want, you also change the enviroment. which in turn changes the growth of the mushroom like food all the creatures eat, and the creatures will have to adapt, which they sometimes do, and sometimes dont.

so far i have managed make over 40 different species go extinct.. wheelp!

-cute sprites
- advance DNA system that will most likely be expanded upon in the future
-evolution tree that shows you the evolution history of the creatures
- unique and has lots of potential in the future

this is my first game review and i have really missed a game where you could play with eugenics and DNA, like in simlife or creatures, only wish there was more games like this! and this is why made this review since this game seems really underrated at this moment

If, like me, you found Gridworld way too difficult to understand and get into then this should definitely be more your speed. The learning curve is still rather steep, mainly due to the lack of tooltips explaining what specific objects do, but the UI is a lot more accessible and you can easily learn how the game works if given enough time.

The game doesn't really have a goal other than keeping your species alive and having fun doing whatever you feel like. You can guide their evolution, watch them evolve naturally, split them to have specific groups evolve differently and so forth. It's all about creating the conditions to help them evolve. After two hours I'm starting to get the hang of the evolution mechanics and finally can guide my species to evolve down different paths. I accidentally created a species that turned out to be very aggressive and they wiped out my other species.

It's still a bit barebones but the developer clearly has a passion for his project and I can definitely see this going places. He also regularly responds to questions on the forums and is very open about his project. Right now the game is very well polished and I've encountered no bugs. It's just a bit sparse on features so if you're looking for a more fleshed-out game then you might want to hold off for a bit.

You can also try the demo version available on Newgrounds - http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/659304