Asbury Pines

Full transparency - I refunded because it's just not my cup of tea. I see a lot of others dig this game, which more power to them, but I really had a tough time getting into it, and refunded quick because I wasn't sure I would be allowed to with early access. I'm going to list my impressions off the bat with my personal pros and cons:

Pros:
- Dig the vibe as a Twin Peaks fan
- The concept is what drew me in as a puzzle mystery fan
- Narratively, the idea of a story spanning millennia is very appealing and unique. As a writer myself IRL I dig the writing challenge this presents and the feelings you get from recognizing something bigger than yourself. (I got reminded of a book called All Tomorrows that deals with this is a sci-fi way)
- The little bits of writing you get as rewards are the most interesting part. Some are better than others but I still think this is a highlight.

With other idlers I've played, the building of resources is primarily circular: You get more to be able to get more. Adding the element of mystery to this one makes that mystery especially important. To make up for the lull, every bit of narrative has to be juicy and compelling. That being said:

Cons:
- Gameplay does not gel with the story at all. I love a great story, especially a great mystery story, but I have to want to keep playing to find out what happened. In my opinion, the idle genre does not serve the intrigue, thrill, and constant stakes that are necessary for an engaging mystery. This game doesn't know if it wants to be a passive idler or an active investigation, and i think both parts suffer a bit as a result.

- In that vein, some writing you get as a reward is not even really story related, and purely just vibes based to enrich the setting. The writing itself is good, and I can appreciate this in a book where I'm experiencing what a character is going through, but when it's supposed to be me doing this work and waiting forever, it's a tad disappointing for my next reward to be about ~ sunlight through the trees ~ and not the juicy stuff I'm after. Doesn't give me a whole lot of motivation to continue idling.

- Experiencing the characters and then immediately being able to use them as pawns in my own game kind of removes any personal care I had for who they are as people. I'm trapped between them acting as they are written, as individuals, and then a hard left turn to basically the Sims. The mayor can scavenge on the sidewalk? Would he actually do that as a character? Probably not but I guess I have to let him since this is the beginning and we're moving so slow actually making this town.

(I think the developers noticed this because there are only specific characters that can unlock certain artifacts, which I think is a step in the right direction, but ultimately for me the problem runs much deeper. This narrative dissonance that you create as the player makes it tough to get me to care about the characters, and therefore tough to want to continue.)

- I won't comment much on the progress collecting things and workings things since that wouldn't be fair with how long I played, but I will say, being able to worship stone pillars and unlock astronomy in 2025 also felt really weird. I get wanting to start at the very beginning like Civilization tech trees, but that was one more minor thing that took me out of it. Maybe starting from the middle and being able to work back and forward would make more sense

- Resource pop-ups and notifications could be much clearer to the user.

Finally, Price: Given everything I've laid out, in my opinion this game is not worth almost 10 dollars at early access. I would have given it more of a shot if it we only $5-$7 dollars.

I appreciate all the hard work that went into this game. I hope my review is helpful in some way to the developers and to people interested in this product. Have a good day.

Asbury Pines starts out like a Twin Peak-esque game. It is set in a small town in 2025, surrounded by pinetrees. It is the usual sleepy town - a sheriff who just wants to get home; a raging insane women, shouting on the streets; a gas station employee doing chores. Then one day a young women is murdered - decapitated, in fact, however, it is done absolutely cleanly. No footprints, no handprints, no signs of struggle - it’s like she killed herself. You have to find out who her killer is.

That is when the time travel starts.

Time goes forward, first, so you see a post-apocalyptic version of the city after the internet has been taken down globally, and anarchy sets in.

Then you go back. Or to be more precise: you start to experience the past of the town as well. First the 1999, Y2K Version, with the same character's younger version, new locations, old locations during their golden era. Then another era appears: 1990. Then you experience more and more eras, going back hundreds of years, and eventually, back to the stone age.

But all of these timelines happen parallel to each other - and you have to manage the life of the town. You have to scavenge for resources, you have to turn them into products. You have to assign the members of the town to these posts. And whatever you find in the past, part of it can be used in the future, where, for example, food becomes super scarce, yet it is abundant in the future.

Every action you take, every step you make usually results in a new bit of story unlocking. A day in a person's life. A snippet of text messages. A newspaper clipping. A piece of diary, telling about the person, or the town, or some events.

Then you experience the same - with animals, plants. They are also part of the story, of the everyday life of the town. You see how a tree experiences hundreds of years, the inhabitants of the town

And the twist is: this is not an adventure or a strategy game. It is an incremental / idle game. Which means that the story is already written, you are just uncovering it in a bit of a random order. Most of the things are happening passively, but you have to make decision about everything. Where to send people to work, what to scavenge for, how to utilize it. You are constantly receiving resources - basically automatically - and you have to use it. It has extreme uses as well because you have 3 different research trees.

At one you can research new forms of government which makes the life and work of the characters more efficient, or more impactful.
You can also do the same with religions, like forming a cult of the sloth, which makes worksites yield more resources with more downtime
You also research "technologies" which achieve the same. This process can take 24-48hrs - in real time - depending on how many people you assign to said task, and how good they are. Then they die - yet work still.

Anything and everything can happen in Asbury Pines. And it is brilliant. You don’t see it at first, you don’t see it after 5 hours, but every single character, every piece of information is part of a massive tapestry, which you are uncovering strand by stran.

It has 50+ characters, 350+ story snippets. And they are all written AMAZINGLY. Fitting to their character, their style, and in various formats. It is unlike any game I have ever played. And revolutionary in the genre, where theme is always just a layer - it was always about numbers going up. Here, numbers also grow and getting bigger, but in the meantime, you experience a complete, super long story as well.

An amazing achievement – one of the best games of 2025 for me.

I have to give this one a negative, because Steam won't let us give a neutral review.

tldr: It IS a novel take on storytelling, and you'll probably have a good time if you're into the sort of human suffering sort of story this brings. It is engaging to see how the various plots intertwine, and it is interesting to see how things proceed, particularly in the future eras. But it isn't flawless and both the gameplay and story drag at times.


On the positive side, Asbury Pines is a novel take on exploring a story that slowly reveals itself over time. I can't recall another blend of an idle game where the story itself is the hook providing the motivation. And while the story does attempt to portray how one time period affects another and even includes some light time travel, it falls short of what could be done with this approach.

The flip side of relying on the story is that the actual gameplay is incredibly basic. There's no meaty, crunch gameplay loop, nor does the gameplay expand beyond what you experience in the first ten minutes. You have people, you can assign them to places and wait for resources. Or you can click a button, wait, and get their story. That's it. The game does try to spice this up by having some resources carry over from one era to the next, but it just doesn't matter in all but two cases and can almost be entirely ignored. You'll spend so much time waiting for other things, that the resource generation is never really an issue.

So the game has to lean entirely on the story side of things to carry it, and the story is... okay enough, I guess? There are parts of it that are good, particularly late game when you start getting some time travel that explains previous events. But most of the story seems irrelevant or just flavor. That would be okay, except it is so drip fed and start-and-stop that it somewhat becomes a jumbled mess, particularly if multiple eras all have story events firing at once. Several times I'd be trying to read some bit of story, and suddenly unlock another era, half a dozen more characters, an animal, and 8 different work locations, all of which get a notification on screen. Or I'd be unlocking story events from two or even three different eras, which may or may not have any interaction with each other.

Most of the characters just aren't important and don't really move the story forward. They do flesh out the world a bit, but particularly the past time periods. it will be a while before there is any payoff for exploring them.

Then at the end, the full extent of the story is revealed in just a few instances and you see how time travel has nicely closed the loop and put a bow on things. Except THE MOST IMPORTANT story event, which is left as a wishy-washy unclosed time loop. If a certain event happens, then one time stream is followed, which results in that certain event not happening, which means that the other stream is followed, which means that events cause the first event to happen... It's an unclosed paradox, and it's the most pivotal event in the entire story. All the other events close nicely, except for the one the entire story is about.

Because of the way that the story is revealed slowly, the majority of the character stories in the first half of the game are people looking to various gods for help, their lives inevitably falling apart, and then them complaining about it. Future, present, past, doesn't matter, they're all wrapped up in religion and the philosophy thereof. There's so much of it that it starts to overshadow what ultimately turns into the actually important storyline. Eventually the game gets away from this about the time the snails start coming around, but it takes a while, and it overstays its welcome. Seriously, outside of the first 5 characters or so, you follow that pattern for probably the next 50 characters before there's any real deviation from this pattern.

This is not a child's game. There is some *dark* stuff in there. Murder, depravity, society collapse, alcoholism, exploitation, tribalism, etc, but nothing a mature individual can't handle. Just understand that there are very few happy people in this game, and almost every character in this game is going to have a terrible life. There is payoff for this in the end, but you're going to be reading the lives of roughly 80 or so people who are just miserable on your way to that point.

Character stories are richly detailed. Artifact, locations, etc are not. They're just blurbs that don't really seem to have any significance. Again, it's fleshing out the world, but not in meaningful ways.

The UI is oddly separated. You'll spend a lot of time switching back and forth between scavenging locations, work locations, and nature locations. They're separated... for reasons? Same with the three tech trees. I guess it helps distinguish which sets various characters are good at, but it means you're flipping between different sections of the game as though they were different game systems, but they're really just artificially separated to make the game seem deeper even if it's an extremely shallow system.

One notable weird thing is how sexuality is presented. Every relationships in this game is heterosexual, but all homosexual interaction is reduced to raw sexualily (and conversely, all sexual encounters are strictly homosexual), in a way seemingly designed to frustrate everyone, regardless of your position. If you're against homosexuality, all sexuality in this game is homosexual (except for one off-hand comment by one character). If you are on board with homosexuality, homosexual relationships are reduced to sexual encounters, nothing deeper or lasting or more than a sexual encounter. It's like they wanted to include it to check a checkbox, but did so in a way that's just going to annoy everybody.

These leaves the game feeling like a fresh take on storytelling, but falling just short in almost every category. Gameplay is weak. UI is scattered. Worldbuilding is shallow and fragmented. Characters lack depth, and many feel formulaic or have little impact.

And yet I went ahead and played the game through. It IS a novel take on storytelling, and you'll probably have a good time if you're into the sort of human suffering sort of story this brings. It is engaging to see how the various plots intertwine, and it is interesting to see how things proceed, particularly in the future eras. But it isn't flawless and both the gameplay and story drag at times. Interesting to play through once, but falls short of what could be done with this approach to idle story.