started playing roots of pacha and here are my thoughts so far
the character designs are... pretty ugly for the most part LOL. i say this with affection. but i highly doubt i'll want to romance anyone based on looks alone.
i like the player body types, though i do wish there was more variety. especially like... fatness. please.
lotttts of ashy skintones for the brown and Black characters, which is unfortunate. there's a couple of okay ones, but some of them are egregiously bad.
lack of afrotextured hairstyles for the Black NPCs so far too. why does everyone have straight hair, man! there's a couple of decent afrotextured hairstyles for the player character, but not many (tbh the player hairstyles are kind of ugly in general, but there's ofc WAY more straight/wavy ones)
VERY jarring to see the blonde girl with pigtails looking straight out of the 2000s in this stone age farming sim but i'll allow it whatever. some of the character designs just feel a bit clunky to me.
i don't know who is and isn't a romance candidate yet but like i said, not much interest in anyone... and the ones i do like are uh, all married. as usual. i think this game might be falling into the stardew+co thing of "you can only romance a 20-something year old" but we'll see
i loooove the farming mechanics so far! having just one tool that does pretty much everything is SO USEFUL and so preferable to having to switch between axe/pickaxe/fishing rod/etc all the time in most farming sims.
the fishing mini game is cute and way less tedious than pretty much every fishing mechanic ever. i appreciate that games are trying to branch out with those these days
the flute mechanic is SO nice. i feel like there's something to be said about the way the game subverts the expectation of like, capturing/forcibly taming an animal; we're making friends with them instead and respecting them and the land in that way, which feels like... an attempt at being mindful of Indigenous practices maybe.
related to the above, the reason i think this is also because (as someone pointed out on a post somewhere on here) the crops we start with are the original/indigenous varieties of each crop. the game also clearly takes a lot of inspiration from indigenous groups' relationships to the land in general (which i wonder if there's room for criticism there; i don't know enough about anything to have an opinion other than an observation of 'they're trying to do this thing/this is what it makes me think of')
i really like the UI and sound design for the game. lots of fun sounds and bubbles; i found the UI a bit overwhelming at first but i got used to it fast.
i like the way you're introduced to everyone with "you know this person as..." and their relationship to the rest of the clan! it feels like a nice way to really emphasize that the clan are all important to one another and interlinked to each other.
i'm only 3 days in so we'll see if i have more thoughts going forwards
