Checked out Elin
I've played quite a bit of Elin over the last week. It's an early-access successor to a game called Elona, which I've never played, but I've heard enough deranged things about that game to try giving it a shot.
Elin is, as best I can describe it, a life sim and homesteading simulator (like Stardew Valley) and a traditional grid roguelike (like ADOM or Caves of Qud) stuck in a blender together. Its combat mixes inspirations from hotbar RPGs and traditional grid-based roguelikes... which mostly just makes it more confusing to me than either of those genres.
It's also extremely eccentric. The game is completely obsessed with the concept of paying your taxes - almost immediately, your character begins to get enormous tax bills delivered in the mail, and paying them is actually a huge hassle which severely restricts your ability to just hang out and explore the world. Failing to pay your taxes is punished severely, so I must frequently return to my home and craft a bunch of desks, chairs, or "drugs", then sell them and walk the proceeds of the sale several days to the southeast to pay the mayor in a neighboring town. It's a bizarre core loop which, all on its own, completely sets the tone of your entire experience in the game.
The game is "eccentric" in many other ways as well. The character-title-generating system generated a slur for me when I started my second save. The Steam reviews are full of people eagerly informing you that you can do sex work to earn money in the game (I haven't figured out how to do this, but I've tried). Bows cannot be equipped in inventory, but are treated as a hotbar skill - the only weapon which works this way. I seem to gain spell recharges randomly, while sleeping. Sometimes, a creature will drop its own DNA as loot. The animals and people on your base can generate "burnable" waste, but it cannot be burned in a fire - it can only be smashed into paper using a hammer, or processed via some massively inconvenient crafting tree shit I have not yet unlocked, which turns it into a currency you can use at a specific vendor in another city (it is never burned). The crafting trees are not particularly intuitive, or even fun; neither is the farming. I found the story completely unreadable.
The game isn't quite a roguelike, but does take heavy inspiration from the genre. Like several of my favorite roguelikes, its world map is generated with some random and some consistent elements each time you start a new world. Every tile on the world map has random terrain and enemies on it, as well as random events... like priests from one religion hanging a member of another on a gallows. There are lots of ways to die instantly, but you're also pursuing very long-term progression by constructing houses, crafting resource chains, setting up production facilities staffed by your employees, etc - the exact stuff you'd do in a farming or settlement simulation game. You CAN play the game with some pretty harsh save restrictions and death punishments... so if you want to play Ironman Stardew, this is the game for that.
It's extremely grindy, too. You gain XP for doing things, so you can just do something over and over again, mindlessly, to get better at it. But you must do this for ages to get any good at it at all... I spent something like an hour trying to raise my music skill a few nights ago, and didn't even get good enough to perform a single bar of the song without screwing up, or to escape a crowd performance without injuries from furious audience-members. Standing in the middle of a town and enraging everyone with my lute is pretty funny.
I can't yet tell whether the grinding I'm doing is typical, or whether my inexperience at the game is making it take longer for me. Qud has a few tricks you can do to gain experience very quickly, and it took me years to learn those. I can't yet tell what the grind-skip techniques would be in Elin, if any.
The developer is Japanese, and the English script is pretty unevenly localized. The text involved in a lot of combat and item names is pretty OK, but the conversation dialogue is very difficult to chew through. The build notes are "translated by ChatGPT," and the developer has posted about using it for code as well... but in 2023 they posted about feeling like Steam's rules meant they could not use it to generate text for in-game documents, so I'm guessing the story text is handwritten. The story I've seen consists of cutscenes which play while you are asleep, showing the various major NPCs in the plot arguing (in the next town over? I think?) and socializing. I located one of them in the world while I was awake, but he just told me that he was upset at the "lack of moderation" displayed by the young women of the world.
The next time I encountered an NPC, he ordered me executed by a robot.
I can't really say that I recommend this game yet unless you are looking to have A Time disentangling something a little bit grotesque - a game experience I respect, because I enjoy it myself. I haven't actually disliked my time with Elin so far, because I'm still enjoying the puzzle of figuring out how to do anything in this game. And there is a LOT to figure out how to do. I feel like I could spend thirty hours just figuring out how to do everything in this game, and I still wouldn't feel like I'd fully explored any of it.
In which case, I'd say that my biggest critique of Elin is probably the artstyle. I understand why someone would want to make a game which looks this way... I, too, played the MMORPGs which looked like this, way back in the early 2000s... but the art is so regular that it almost undermines the eccentric gameplay. Part of the reason I love Qud is the way it looks - it looks like it feels to play. But Elin looks so bland and expected that it actually makes the game feel more broken than it really is.
I get the impression, though, that this game wouldn't even exist at all if it couldn't look regular and expected. The energy seems to be going somewhere other than art direction. Maybe that's for the best. I'm curious to see what becomes of all that by the time it hits release.