Fizel

I bought this game in February 2020 and I still play it on occasion. It's definitely worth 18 euro. Honestly I think it would be a good value at 30-40 euro as well.

I like to think of this as the "adult" version of Minecraft, even though it's not really like Minecraft at all. Yes, this game looks similar at first glance because it's a procedural generated world made up of blocks. You gather resources, build, and survive. There's a 3x3 crafting grid like in Minecraft which is used for some things but there's also a much more intricate crafting system when it comes to cooking, clayworking, smelting, blacksmithing, and leatherworking.

You place your clay on the ground and you shape each layer of the thing you're making voxel by voxel. You put the raw, unfired clay into a pit kiln and light it on fire so the clay can cook and harden. If you want to make a pickaxe, you must first build a mold out of clay, cook it in the pit kiln, then place it on the ground or on a table. You also need to make a crucible out of clay and do the same thing. You put the crucible on a firepit, add your copper nuggets, and light the fire. The fire has to be hot enough to melt copper which means you can't use sticks as a fuel source. You have to make charcoal or use brown or black coal.

Once the crucible is full of molten copper, you pour it into the pickaxe mold you made earlier. Once the copper cools, you have a pickaxe head. Open the crafting grid and place it in there and put one stick under it.

Some things can't be made with molds. So you have to build an anvil. You create an anvil mold out of clay, pour your molten metal in, and let it cool. Then you pour molten metal into ingot molds to make ingots. Those can be re-heated on a forge so they can be worked on the anvil. Then you use a hammer (which you have to make using a hammer mold) to shape the ingot, voxel by voxel, until it has the correct shape for whatever you're making.

In Minecraft you'd just take a few diamonds or iron ingots, plop them in the crafting grid with some sticks and you have tools. That's boring. Leatherworking and cooking have different mechanics which are also more complex than Minecraft.

I've spent a lot of time talking about the crafting aspects of it but you can also grow crops, fruit trees, raise bees (and collect honey), and breed animals. Each new generation of animal you breed gets tamer and tamer. Eventually they won't be afraid of you at all. You can bake pies and bread, make soups and stews, make jam, beer, and preserve meat.

Food spoils over time so you have to find ways to preserve it. Jam lasts longer than the berries you use to make it, cured meat lasts longer than normal cooked meat, and you can put soups and stews in crocks in a cellar to make them last longer. And you have to do this or you will be very hungry when winter comes and your crops die.

I really enjoy the depth and level of detail this game has.