In Critter Cove, you’re roped into working on restoring a decrepit town on a tropical island. You start with essentially nothing, in almost survival game fashion, needing to build your own basic tools after getting your house title from the rat who runs the place. However, despite all the animals you cross, the game has broadened it’s horizons from other games out there and your tools never break. You also don’t owe anything on the house, other than your countless hours of unpaid labour. Though, not all of it is unpaid either.
You start off with a fairly broad character builder. Despite the look of the generic brown haired white protag featured on some of the Steam assets and the trailer, you don’t have to be a dude. In fact, you don’t need to be human, given an option of a variety of appearances for mammal, reptilian, or avian appearances. You’ve got a bunch of options to adjust the colours, and three options for pronouns at the end (he/him, she/her, they/them).
Critter Cove tutorializes fairly heavily, but, it doesn’t feel too heavy-handed. Everything is there to push you into accomplishing the next step to getting the town restored without feeling too lost in what you should be looking for. The game removes a lot of the friction you’d normally find in the early game of similar titles. There are no bag upgrades to be seen, you’ve got a fairly spacious character inventory to start. Your house has 2 chests, and chests don’t necessarily share inventory, but you can scroll through each chests inventory from any chest. You’re encouraged to pick up and move your second chest to a more convenient location outside your home.
These decisions help you actually DO the things you need to do. Which is mostly demolishing the busted and broken for parts to fix up the local infrastructure or build new bits. You do a bit of rescuing others from nearby islands to come live at yours, and exploring for parts unique to those islands. There’s also a hefty underwater component, salvaging wrecks or mysteriously flooded buildings. The underwater portions are surprisingly well done, given how this can be a major pain point in any game.
Critter Cove is in early access, with a base price of 24.99 usd. It’s currently sitting at overwhelmingly positive and it’s easy to see why. I kinda regret taking so long to get the demo played, which, they make mention when you start, will carry your progress over to the full version.