I've played through Mewnbase twice now and really like it. The game does strike me as being a little on the easy side, though. It would be great to have some starting options to adjust the scarcity/abundance of resources and frequency of various weather events to let people tweak the level of challenge involved, but beyond that I've noticed a few things that might benefit from a small adjustment to balance the difficulty a little (particularly early on in the game). I'll list my thoughts here, and would be interested to know if anybody else has anything to add:
- Hearty meals can easily be stockpiled early in the game, which eliminates the pressure to look for food throughout. This in turn makes the garden patch and greenhouse (and the water-collecting devices that serve them) seem a little unnecessary: fun to set up, but not at all required to survive.
- Oxygen leaks seem trivial to fix. I can't see them posing much of a problem unless you'd let your suit's oxygen get very low, were unable to produce power, and the leak had virtually emptied your base already. It might be interesting to have some kind of repair patch item that's needed to fix them, or for the leak to instantly empty the base and then take some time to fix.
- Oxygen canisters seem a little too generous, especially considering they don't don't take much to craft. Since they completely refill your oxygen, having one in your inventory lets you can more or less forget about keeping an eye on it at all. If your oxygen runs out, you just use the tank and return directly to your base.
- Base modules can be shuffled around without penalty. I've been using switches for convenience, but if you urgently need to divert power to something important, you can simply pick up any machines you aren't using and put them right into your inventory.
- Similarly, running out of power doesn't do any real harm. You can quite happily keep a couple of biofuel generators on hand and just chuck wood in every now and then because research/crafting progress will always pick up right where it left off.
- There's virtually nothing in the game that will reduce your health directly. The only thing I've noticed is lightning (and I love the animation, by the way!). Other than that, health mainly acts as a buffer when you run out of oxygen or go too long without food. This puts the medbay in the same position as the greenhouses: it helps your base feel complete, but there's very little occasion to use it and it's extremely unlikely you'd desperately need it.
It's not that I'd like the game to be vastly more difficult: I really quite enjoy the fact that there are no enemies and that you're free to focus on building neat stuff rather than just scraping by. However, certain elements of the game (especially food) can be more or less removed from the equation within the first few minutes. This has a bit of a knock-on effect, where the relative abundance of basic necessities means you can really breeze through the research (or anything else you set your mind to). I think the gameplay would feel more varied if you had to weigh up your options more (at least early on), and if you occasionally had to stop what you were doing to deal with the sandstorms, oxygen leaks, and lightning strikes (which currently don't warrant much of a response).
Really looking forward to seeing how this develops, by the way! Based on the game description I was expecting something much less complete: both my runs through have been great fun and virtually bug-free.