Review: Fossil Hunters (2018)

Original post: https://misthold.dreamwidth.org/14539.html

Fossil Hunters (2018) is a casual action-adventure game where you play as a fossil-hunter! You combine different fossil parts to make weird dinosaur skeletons to sell to a mysterious Collector. There's 30-ish floors in the digsite, and the further down you go the more weird stuff shows up. Also, there's a background mystery about missing fossil hunters? Plus cute art.

It's a simple concept but really fun…at least for about an hour or so.

Game play is VERY repetitive and is literally just digging up fossils, combining them into skeletons, and selling them to the Collector. Obstacles to your success are cave-ins, bugs, and falling off ledges. Unfortunately, I didn't have the patience to keep playing until I finally unlocked a store, which might've had something I could buy to help with the attacking bug thing.

A review on Steam says there's about 15 hours of play time, which is a very good value. However, I was way more interested in the missing fossil hunters backstory and expanding the (ultimately useless) field guide than I was in the actual game, and I definitely didn't want to play 15 hours of just digging up fossils.

There's a co-op option which I think would make this much more fun (and faster) to play. This would be a cute, casual party game for a group of friends– or maybe really young kids who don't mind repetitive game play as much.

Price: $14.99

Available for Windows, macOS, Nintendo Switch, and Playstation 4. I played the the Mac version at first and my computer suffered a lot– plus you really need a controller to play. I then bought the Switch version and played that!