We all love addicting games that just keep immersed for hours. Spending hours upon hours living off the in-game land or exploring a new and unfamiliar territory is just captivating. That’s why titles like Minecraft, Stardew Valley and Terraria succeed where even triple A games fail. They might look like titles from the earlier days of gaming but their addicting nature of exploration and crafting makes players feel as if they are making progress and equally gives them purpose while playing. To find new lands, build and live as if they truly are adventurers. Forager by developer HopFrog and publisher HumbleBundle will try to stand against these behemoth titles but can it pull of such a large undertaking? Find out below to read further into our full review of Forager for the PC!

Forager is a top-down adventure game where exploration comes in a rather unique way. Rather than be given the whole world upon boot up, Forager makes players earn their adventure. Earn gold via foraging the land for resources to unlock new places to explore and new sights to see. Level up and gain new skills to build new items and equipment to make your scavenging adventure just a bit easier. There is no one way to play Forager. You can try to save up hundreds of gold to unlock expensive areas or unlock the smaller ones to make crafting easier. Forager is a simple adventure title but with themes that make it a truly addicting game by every definition of the word.

If your first thought when looking at Forager is “oh another Minecraft” we’d completely understand your logic. A white-shaped human holding a pickaxe just screams box breaking Minecraft. From the first look at Forager’s box art, it is quite easy to see why many gamers will comment that this is just another indie Minecraft. When we entered the world of Forager though, we were quite surprised to find out this original judgment might have been quite hasty. Let’s find out why our thoughts were a bit too hasty in our full review of Forager for the PC!

Forager isn’t a difficult game to jump right into. Players control a little humanoid being and will immediately notice their land to travel is quite tiny. When you begin Forager, unlike Minecraft you aren’t just given free roam of a giant world to explore. Forager makes the player earn their adventure by salvaging from the little land to gain gold and resources that inevitably allow them to buy new areas to explore. With each new area, your map, items to find and things to see increase exponentially. Within the first hour, you’ll go from one small piece of land to at least several that each posses’ new items to salvage and to use as building materials.

After the first few hours of Forager, you’ll notice something quite interesting. Minecraft—in comparison to Forager—has players gaining materials to build large structures, sleep, farm and various other activities. Forager has many of these themes but dialed down to create a simpler experience overall. You still need to find iron ore and coal to use for crafting in a forge and you’ll need to gain experience points—which is earned via every action—to buildup your explorer’s income/equipment but never does Forager feel overwhelming. You’ll live off the land by procuring berries, meat and other foods to keep your hearts from dropping due to hunger and you’ll occasionally face enemies in the form of slimes or wild boar but never did anything in Forager feel like Minecraft, despite the apparent themes from it.

For example, let’s examine the food/health/level system in depth within Forager. As you make progress in Forager by doing just that, foraging, you will gain level up points to earn new skills and help your survival aspects just a bit more. Dying in Forager comes at a pretty heft cost, a Game Over. When you die in Forager, you are forced back to the main menu and must load a previous save—Forager has auto saves and manual ones—to try and survive better than your last go. Mirroring Minecraft, you are basically getting better as you progress, but unlike Minecraft, advancement comes in a more obvious way thanks in large part to the game telling you what you’ll get as you level up via the skills you can purchase.

Comparing Forager to Minecraft becomes a moot point even further when you look at the design HopFrog went for visually. Unlike the blocky landscape of Minecraft, Forager can be more compared to Fez—an indie puzzle title—and/or Stardew Valley. There’s a very retro design to Forager that makes the overall game look akin to a Super Nintendo title but that actually gives it its own uniqueness. We love the little mushroom people that make sad faces when you hit them or the cows running around trying to escape your pickaxe slamming into them for fresh meat and leather. Add to this a very simple—but not noteworthy—OST and Forager becomes a truly cute and simple indie title.

Forager isn’t going to replace Minecraft or Stardew Valley, but it can still stand side by side to those two titans. This is due in large part to the great simplicity Forager has all while being quite addicting. You’ll easily lose hours of your life going around the small puzzle-like world to gain new lands and scavenge from the land. With several updates planned adding more concepts like combat, Forager, we imagine, will only get bigger and bigger becoming a truly awesome title, if you want a simpler game where you’re not building giant structures but instead focusing on finding new areas to explore and items to find. We can’t recommend Forager enough to gamers who need a good time waster. While it might seem like a double entendre to say Forager is a time waster, this is an example where we don’t mind spending our precious minutes. We can only hope to keep finding new areas to see and new items to help build our world, one step at a time.

In the current indie scene, a lot of games try to mimic the greatness that Notch made when he created Minecraft. Forager shows that you can take similar ideas to Minecraft or Stardew Valley but equally be simpler and still retain the fun and addictive design we adore in the games mentioned above. We can’t wait to see what HopFrog has in store for us via these updates in the Roadmap of Forager, but until then, we’ll keep playing just because we are loving what is offered as is. Are you going to nab Forager for the PC or plan on waiting for it to drop on other consoles? Comment below and let us know in the comments section below! For all your gaming reviews and article needs, be sure to keep stuck to our hive here at Honey’s Anime!