Monastery: Ora et Labora

I love the premise, the scope is just right, and there's a cozy little game in there. However, it's gonna be a "no" for now. Not because of the AI art assets. Not because of lack of content. But because of a number of annoying game design decisions. Let me tell you of those. 1. There are two parallel progression systems, the "research" one where you get points for the books your monks write and use them to unlock tech; and the "monastery progression" one, where you get points for "daily quests" that grant you goodies. Out of these, the "research" one is secondary - it mostly serves to give you access to new resource types (read - 4 types of ale), but that's about it. The "monastery" "daily quest" system is the main one - you get not just cosmetics from it, but also land extensions and expansions to how many visitors your church gets (= your income). So what's the problem? First of all, I keep "daily quests" in brackets for a reason. These quests do not refresh. So once you get them - you gotta do the things the game wants you to. And there is no other way to progress other than to do those things. The game just won't roll you any new tasks until you do the previous ones. This ma…

Great game and has a lot of potential with roadmap updates. I recommend this to anyone who loves management sims. Low difficulty, but is entertaining enough for me to play hours.

I do enjoy the game, it is quiet, comfy, the UI is nice and intuitive, so is the progress. My issues are: - I feel it is badly optimized, on my 2022 PC it is burning my GPU like open fire (fps limit helps) - Until there's more world events, the current selection gets boring quickly - At times you feel like you are just watching the game, not being able to do much. - This might be on me, but often I feel like my monks are just too inefficient, I have around 12 in my latest playthrough and they can barely handle basic things like water, grain farm, cleanup.

Great fun, very relaxing and enjoyable. Slowly build a monastry to meet daily requests from the community whilst paying tax and making beer.

I like the game loop and the setting is new. I will for sure put some hours behind this game.

Even in early access this game is very interesting, and the grind is not boring, but natural. I really like it + where on earth do you have monastery management simulator?! 7/10 stars, and when more content comes (and it will, we already have roadmap) the game will be worth probably 8-9 stars.