Forager's cute and uncanny in that way that only clicker games can be
Let's say you're wandering in the desert. You're walking a trail, and fog has set in. Thick fog on both sides of you, obscuring all of the landscape that lies beyond the trail. But, occasionally, the fog clears for a second, and it reveals that the trail runs along the ridge of a mountain, which means that the ground drops away on either side, and you are teetering, forever teetering, on the brink of oblivion.
This is Forager. It's a decidedly cute game in which you control a funny sort of marshmallow person stuck at the centre of a brightly coloured world. The grass is very green here, the water very blue. Off to the north is a fountain where a fairy likes to hang out, and over to the east is a temple, emerging from the sands. The top-down perspective and the lovely, rounded trees, along with the punchy, screen-shaky combat against blobs of green slime and funny pig things, suggests that we're in Zelda territory. But the pickaxe you carry with you, the rocks and trees you can hit with it and the ore and lumber you can gather, suggests Minecraft. Then there are the furnaces and anvils and sewing tables you can make in order to turn materials into other materials. Maybe this is Stardew territory, or Terraria? I pondered all of this until I read the tooltip for the Treasuries entry on the skills screen. "Banks generate coins 50% faster," it told me. "When adjacent to other banks."
That's the moment the fog lifted, just for a second. The path I was walking was suddenly so high, the air so thin, and the ground dropped away on either side.
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