Yolk Heroes: A Long Tamago

On First boot it’s reminiscent of booting up a Gameboy, making you feel like you’re about to play something from back in the day, Nostalgia bomb inbound. The Menu music is clean, and MIDI scored and even through my computer made me long for the little pinky-fingernail-sized speaker my old Gameboy had. You can tell from the music that it’s inspired from titles like Pokémon, Dragon Warrior, and Early Final Fantasy titles. With all that out of the way, Let’s get on with the ratings:

Gameplay: 3.5 out of 5 Gems

The gameplay is easy to get into, the controls are very simple, the menus do take some time to navigate to get the inner workings. One of the complaints I do have is the mini games have almost no effect on timers, For the largest part of this hour I was playing the minigames for the sleep and Bladder options, so I was playing Nap N poop Simulator for probably 15 to 20 minutes out of the whole hour. My biggest critique for this would be to increase the reward for a “Perfect” landing on the sleep minigame, and not have to spam the buttons so fast to complete the poop minigame. Minor note, also calling it Poop while the text is relieving the bladder was a bit off, but I’ll chalk that up to translation. Overall I will say the gameplay is decent. I’m sure once the first part is over and the questing can begin it will be better for the complaints I do have.

Soundtrack: 3.5 out of 5 gems

The soundtrack of the game again reminds me of original Nintendo JRPG’s like Dragon Warrior/Quest and the Original Final Fantasy, with just a hint of Gameboy Pokémon Red/Green. While it’s no John Williams original Score, it is still enjoyable to listen to, and reminisce about the old days. That is if you are old like Old Man Gibu here. The game feels familiar while still feeling new with this music, I was not disappointed in the slightest.



Graphics: 3 out of 5 Gems

The Graphics of this game are Pixel Art, Akin to the Gameboy Color. Once I found out that you could change the Hue to a different scheme and there are Dozens of them to choose from it took me a fair amount of time to settle on one that was pleasing to my eyes. There are several schemes that go very well with different personalities, Even the Fairy who serves as your guide recommends Pink as you learn about the menu during the game.
The Graphics aren’t going to win any awards for innovation by any means, however it feels new and unique in it’s design so I give it a good score.

Difficulty: 4 out of 5 gems

While the game itself isn’t very challenging, The learning all the minigames, along with having to discover them as you go, proved quite challenging, I found myself cheering when I finally figured out what the minigames are and how to complete them. I had a lot of fun finding them all that I did find and look forward to finding the rest during more playtime (of which I anticipate there being much more)

Immersion: 4.5 out of 5 gems

This game took me back to my early teens playing Tetris, Pokémon, and Zelda on my Gameboy, While this is an Idle game, it still has the same feel of those games, while being wholly unique by comparison. After getting through the tutorials I was sucked in, this hour flew by a lot faster than I thought it may, the only time I was broken from the immersion is during the “Nap N Poop Simulator” portion of my gameplay. But on the same note, it added a bit of realism to it, You can’t just not poop and not sleep without repercussions, So I will say that I found myself immersed deeply into this game after a very short time.

Overall Rating: 3.7 out of 5 Gems

Yolk Heroes: A Long Tamago is a breath of fresh air to the JRPG indie space, It isn’t a cookie cutter RPGMaker game with nearly no plot, it has heart, it has soul, and it has humor to bind it all together.
The game won’t be for everyone, but I can see it appealing to a wide audience, especially those 80s/90s kids who were glued to their Gameboys. This game really brings Nostalgia as well as a New Game Feel to the user, I applaud 14 Hours Productions on making a great game for a great price, and I am sure that they will surely bring us more amazing games in the future, An Indie game studio that makes games they want to play really brings a smile to my face





Final Thoughts.

So the real question is, is this indie title worth the 7.99 it retails for currently? Absolutely, It’s nearly perfect price point, I would almost say that this game could easily fetch 9.99 without anyone batting an eye. I encountered zero bugs the entire playthrough, which for an Indie title that is only 2 days past it’s release date is a rarity. I believe that the studio puts so much care into what they do that it shows in every pixel displayed on screen. And I truly can not wait to see where 14 Hours Productions goes from here!

I can't figure out how I'm supposed to have fun with this game, and when I asked the dev, instead of any suggestions or answers they just said (essentially) 'the game's not for everyone'.

So, to that end, this game isn't for me, and I can't understand who it's for or why.

I understand the concept of idle games--I've played and enjoyed them before. What I DON'T get is taking the framework of an idle game but tuning all of the idle timings versus manual inputs such that it's vastly more beneficial to pay attention to the game than it is to ignore it, while at the same time making all of said demanding activities so boring that no person could reasonably enjoy paying attention to them for more than a few minutes at a time.

In a normal clicker game, for example, even the time I could spend clicking to gain a resource is mitigated against the time I also have to spend those accrued resources--at a certain point it becomes far more beneficial to buy upgrades than it is to just sit there clicking--but an important distinction is that even when I'm reduced to periods of clicking in the early game, they're still sparse, and heavily interspersed again by upgrades and spending. In this game, even if you want to speed things up, you'll be taking minutes at a time to do so, and the effect in game won't be tangible. Flatly, it just seems like the time economy is botched--and maybe that's okay if you literally do not care about optimizing your time at all, but I do. It's one of the things I've enjoyed most about my previous idle game experiences.

To that end, I can't recommend this 'game'. It also occurred to me after about an hour that for some reason I was supposed to be raising and caring for some tiny boring human looking thing, when instead I could have been raising a cool dinosaur or monster or anything other than whatever this boring elf thing is supposed to be.

Love the name of the game, love the way it looks and the characters are cute but the game play loop needs work. Every time I'd check in to see if I could send my hero on a quest their needs would be too low so I'd set them to do toilet, bath, food and sleep which takes time so I'd walk away. I'd get back to try to set them on a quest again but their needs would be back down. Rinse and repeat. I wish we could queue up going on a quest after queuing up their needs but it just interrupts their bath/toilet/sleeping tasks instead. I really wanted to like this game but I stopped caring after repeatedly missing the window to send them out before their needs would be down again.