▲ Recommended
39 hrs
Introduction:
Taskbarn is my first taskbar/idler game and I have mixed feelings about the genre from my time with it. The one that prevails the most is just what's the point?
Summary:
Positives:
- Runs well
- It is kind of cute
- Easy
Negatives:
- Not as interactive as it could perhaps be
- Seems to take quite a long time to 100%
Achievements:
Normally I make myself 100% a game before reviewing it but it won't be possible in this case. The achievements aren't hard to get in the sense you don't need any skill - just patience. I'm unsure of an estimate for completion but I imagine over 100 hours and wouldn't be surprised if it was even up to 500. One of the achievements is for getting 100,000 currency per second and at ~30 hours I'm on 1,300 per second. I know things compound but there's cosmetics and upgrades to buy too - some which have achievements, so that slows things down.
Performance:
RAM: 16GB Dual-Channel DDR4 @ 1600MHz
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700U with 512MB ATI AMD Radeon Graphics
Storage: WD 500GB SSD
This game ran absolutely fine for me. I chose my work laptop because I often leave it on overnight holding a half-completed task for tomorrow and a healthy dose of about 12 million browser tabs I don't want to lose. If I'd used my gaming PC I'd take the next 5 decades to complete this game. Anyway, it runs fine - that's all you really wanted to know. It does make the fans come on and the PC runs hot when it's multitasking but it's nothing that concerned me and nothing seemed to slow down.
Gameplay:
This is where Taskbarn confused me a bit, because it didn't really feel like a game. If merely the fact that you had to interact with it was enough, then Microsoft Excel would be more of a game than this since you have to do more to get that working. But I feel like a bit of a hypocrite saying this too when I have never said it about FMV games I've reviewed (Blood Shore, Her Story, Five Dates), despite the fact they are very light on interaction too.
But it is not wrong to say that Taskbarn is a game that really plays itself. If you had the know-how you could design something like this in code and just watch the numbers tally on a screen as it multiplies by various amounts to simulate the addons/upgrade that you buy - upgrades, that is, which consist only of you going to a menu and just clicking to either buy more chickens, or another animal, or to by a power-up doubling the sale value of their output or something like that. This is all that you have to do to prestige too, which I guess (aside from having connected achievements) is just for a bit of added challenge. You can get perks that follow over too help you make a new start, but most of your resources are lost and so it does function more like a new start.
The only other role for you in this peculiar experience is to occasionally pick up some objects that drop at random intervals, like wheat, which give you a bit of a cash injection. They drop in repeated set intervals, something like ever 4 - 12 minutes, but they don't stack, so if you leave one waiting for 3 hours you've robbed yourself of however many would have dropped in that time, which is a bit of a shame.
I have seen in other taskbar games that you can feed the animals and this seems like one nice feature to add. I just can't escape the feeling that unless you like watching things moving predictably along your taskbar that this doesn't really add a lot!
Graphics:
Taskbarn is, as you'll see if you come from the Store page, in its entirety a small strip across your taskbar at the bottom of your screen. A 2D pixel farm with but a few sprites that essentially do little else than walk back and forth along its length dropping Dibbles (the game's currency) as they go. With these Dibbles, you will dabble (#SorryNotSorry) in the points shop buying a range of upgrades that I'll address more in the following section.
Taskbarn is visually cute, but it perhaps leans a little too much into the excesses of pixel-style games for me when it comes at a cost to detail. Some of the UI fonts are hard to read - notably the bits that say 'max 30' allowed on a certain power-up, for example. The animals on the taskbar also don't look very much like what they are, and while it's obvious enough to tell a cow from a chicken, it's less easy - especially with skins - to distinguish the duck and the chicken. Now since this is meaningless from a gameplay perspective (there is no reason you need to tell them apart) you may ask why does this matter? And to that I would just ask if these games don't excel for their graphics, or for their gameplay, what is the point of them?
I'd concede that the style is charming but it's not visually outstanding, I don't think. You can judge for yourself how much you like it, but for me the visual presentation is a matter of indifference. We don't have any fancy effects or nice lighting to elevate it. Beyond basic animations for walking and eating, etc., it's very barebones. And presumably this is so it doesn't hog resources on weaker machines while multitasking, which is great - but I have seen (though not played) taskbar games with more remarkable visuals than this.
Audio:
Taskbarn joins the long list of indie games with unremarkable sound. I turned it off pretty much immediately - it has that sort of cute but quite irritating repetitive cheap music any seasoned gamer knows to expect from titles like this, and why do you want it anyway? I watch YouTube videos, listen to music, and write, all with this game open - it just gets in the way.
UI sounds are just there, and to say much more about it would be to waste words. They're functional, and that's enough for a title such as this.
Conclusion:
There's certainly a part of me that has enjoyed this game - I mean, it is kind of cute - but also a part that on reflection feels like Taskbarn is akin to playing with a calculator. You can't write 8008 to show all your mates how it looks like something else but it does kill a bit of time when you're bored.
I do also find it philosophically a bit strange to get a game that essentially (apart from very minimal input by you) plays itself. Maybe I don't feel this with FMVs because there is some interaction narratively - they engage you, like films? This doesn't? I'm not sure. I'm also a bit daunted by just how long it looks like it'll take to 100% the achievements.
I know I've been critical of this game because I don't really see the point of it but I didn't give it a negative review because I think it delivered what it said it was. It's not like it is poorly done or misleading, or anything like that. The issue is not with the quality of the product but with how well it fits my taste, which I don't think justifies me in downvoting it - so I won't.
I'll continue to play this - I have to, to 100% it - but I don't think it's something I'm ever really going to enjoy as such. Its gameplay consists mostly of waiting hours for one second of a feeling that is something more than boredom but less than fun -and if I really wanted to feel that, I'd use the bus more often.
Follow my curator, Elysian Reviews if you want to see more of my reviews in future, and IndieGems for all things indie by a selection of several reviewers! This title was received for free as part of the IndieGems curator programme. Thank you for reading!
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