Rekindled Trails - Playthrough & Ending
20A playthrough of Rekindled Trails, a cozy exploration game where you play as a cat, fish, or goat and some fire spirit holds your soul ransom to fix everything that you wrecked. This involves gathering fish, ore, and herbs to play Tetris with merchant boxes for payment and upgrading towns. I may have opted for a ginger cat due to my character's lack of soul. I may also have played because of the meow when you get items.
I picked this up last week and had some fun with playing something more casual. Curiously it's not entirely family-friendly due to some light swearing. The baddies don't really do much to stop you along the way (not that the game has anything like combat or able to being hurt) which was a little off-putting but the story is adequate even if it plays out how you'd expect. There's also notable typos but I didn't find them too distracting.
This playthrough could have been cut down further but I did work towards tier 3 towns despite none of those upgrades being necessary to complete the main story and reaching tier 3 has minimal rewards, typically just a vendor that sells basic items you can find for that zone. Farmlands, Lost Lagoon, and the Altar have quests for legendary items from a note found when they reach tier 3. Finding these items allows you to use a shrine that gives a brief joke ending.
If you do play this game, don't make my mistake and overlook the clothing pieces the vendors sell as you upgrade towns. These pieces increase the quality of items found for that respective set and you don't even need to wear this clothing to gain the benefits. As well, buying the special effects like charged, flowing, radiant, and dominating allow for increasing the value of items you sell if properly positioned so unlocking them right away (at least charged and flowing) will pay for themselves very quickly. Dominating items requires some serious setup with a high value item (preferably one with 4-5 slots in the direction it points) that then involves placing eggs on its dominating side and using charged/flowing items to increase its price to have each egg sell for crazy prices, such as 5:17:17 which only makes use of 3x eggs. Reviving items are kind of rubbish, as when sold they have a chance to be kept (minus the modifier).
For the selling game each region has one town that doubles the price of fish, ore, and herbs respectively if placed on the appropriate tile (and bad tiles that reduce the price of something to zero for the other two types if placed on it), so you predominantly want to only sell such items to those towns. Items from bushes don't get bonuses or penalized from merchants and their quality cannot be improved so they're largely worthless except for tier 1 town upgrades or if they are charged or flowing to benefit items that are more valuable. Fully filling a box does give a bonus but it's a percentage of the total value of items so a 100% filled box isn't nearly as important as finding high value items and stacking bonuses (eggs can help fill a box if you have no other use for them).
0:00 Intro
0:25 Character Creation
1:30 Tutorial
4:27 Unleashed on the World
5:23 Meeting Frey
7:25 Selling Tutorial
12:28 Visiting the Farmlands
15:30 Farmlands Tier 1
24:18 Emberclaws Tier 1
26:15 Visiting Frostfangs
29:58 Frostfangs Tier 1
48:05 Emberclaws Tier 2
56:00 Frostfangs Tier 2
1:04:25 Finally Delivering Medicine
1:08:35 Visiting Emberclaws (totally for the first time)
1:15:18 Farmlands Tier 2
1:24:25 Talking to Frostfangs & Gathering Ores
1:34:03 Returning to Emberclaws & Getting the Bomb
1:40:20 Dewdrop Grotto
1:46:00 Fixing the Eldra Core
1:55:22 Salt Tunnel
2:00:32 Tonmor Core
2:03:14 Visiting Bucket Barracks
2:07:02 Bucket Barracks Tier 1
2:13:46 Visiting Hideaway Hill
2:15:39 Hideaway Hill Tier 1
2:22:40 Visiting Lost Lagoon
2:23:13 Lost Lagoon Tier 1
2:32:00 Bucket Barracks Tier 2
2:50:12 Hideaway Hill Tier 2
3:10:40 Getting Access to the Factory
3:20:43 Lost Lagoon Tier 2
3:24:01 Merrigan's Lair
3:31:05 Fixing the Tonmor Core
3:47:24 Emberclaws Tier 3
4:15:10 Finally Meeting Up with Frey and Kieran
4:19:25 Nagu Core
4:20:48 Visiting Cattle Canyon
4:23:20 Cattle Canyon Tier 1
4:28:54 Visiting Sunspot Strip
4:31:32 Sunspot Strip Tier 1
4:36:53 Learning about the Altar
4:39:49 Visiting the Altar
4:46:03 The Altar Tier 1
5:01:08 Cattle Canyon Tier 2
5:08:58 Sunstrip Spot Tier 2
5:15:30 The Altar Tier 2
5:24:35 Returning to Frey & Tukupi
5:37:07 Speaking with Kunaima
5:40:10 Confronting Arema
5:46:56 Fixing the Nagu Core
5:57:36 Final Confrontation
6:00:06 Fixing the Heart
6:01:23 Credits
6:03:30 Finding the Legendary Items
6:05:06 Joke Ending
Rekindled Trails can be purchased at https://store.steampowered.com/app/3378330/Rekindled_Trails/
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