Everything is Peachy is a permadeath strategy game where players navigate their spaceship to randomly generated planets. On each planet the ship’s robots must gather peaches to power their ship, while also accomplishing objectives, avoiding hazards, and collecting upgrades. Surviving until the center of the solar system means facing the final boss using the obtained upgrades.

Release Date: August 25th, 2016
Developer: Peacock Dreams Games
Publisher: Hunted Cow Studios
Format: PC Game
First attempt time: 30 minutes
Final playthrough time: 1 hour
Total play time: 4.5 hours

Build production lines to collect peaches!

Major Pros:

• Quick levels
• Easy to learn

Minor Pros:

• Cute
• Use keyboard or mouse

Reach the center to fight the final boss

Major Cons:

• Repetitive
• Player can get soft blocked

Minor Cons:

• Minor inconveniences

First attempt statistics

The gameplay of Everything is Peachy is easy to pick up and most levels can be completed in less than 5 minutes. The ship generates robots on a set clock. Robots can be placed on peaches, upgrades, and objectives to mine them. Once places, robots cannot be moved. Robots that get too far away from the power grid will quickly die, but connected robots extend the power grid to the green area around them. Most of the gameplay involves building networks of robots out to resources to collect them and then pass the resources back along the network to the ship to be permanently obtained. Peacholium (the fuel made from peaches) will slowly be consumed over time, so players must explore planets and complete their objects quickly.

Running out of Peacholium is the only cause of death

There’s a reasonable amount of variety in objective/hazard/upgrade combinations for planets, with not every planet having a hazard or upgrade. Objectives include refueling, escaping collapsing planets, powering pylons, and scavenging ship parts. Upgrades can be found on most planets, including increased power radius, robot speed, mining speed, and several others. Hazards include monsters disguised as peaches, falling meteors, sand wurms, and the player’s own hubris.

Upgrades look like tiny ship parts, hovering over them says what they type they are but not the percent buff

The interface and controls were decent. The graphics are cute and the various icons are all recognizable after seeing them a few times. Planets had a good variety of colors, but without terrain of any kind there wasn’t much else. The game can be controlled with mouse, keyboard, or both. I used primarily both due to issues with the camera and robot movement.

Tutorials are given with short animated clips

I found Everything is Peachy to have several annoying features which came up fairly regularly. First, there’s no way to lock the camera. The camera is always attached to the currently selected robot and cannot be detached until the robot is placed. Meaning that as the player is trying to move the robots around, the thing they’re directing it to is moving as well. This is more of an issue for mouse players, but as a mouse player I found it hard to control and ensure I got my robot in the right place. There’s also no way to completely zoom out and see the whole map.

Max zoom doesn’t show all the map, but helps to minimize camera movement

Second, robots sometimes have momentum when moving, particularly in turning around. I would tells a robot to go set up in an area and then watch them orbit the area trying to turn around and stop. This was particularly annoying since I was locked onto the robot, orbiting with it, and couldn’t select a new one until it sat its butt down. For this I used the keyboard to force a robot to sit immediately if it started doing this, but this meant never getting them quite where I wanted.

Notice where 3 robots are clustered together after trying to patch the first one being misplaced

Third, I didn’t like that as soon as a level’s objective was met, the player would be forced to leave within 30 seconds. I found it particularly hard to determine how long levels involving refueling would take, and missed many an upgrade because it didn’t make it back to the ship in time or I completed the level in less than a minute without time to look around a planet.

There are no solid numbers on what’s been and is being collected in refueling missions

Fourth, players cannot tell which planets they will be able to jump to if they choose to go to a particular planet next. This is important because players cannot revisit old planets to travel to new areas of the solar system. I also discovered that the layout of the solar system can soft block the player. On my second to last run, none of the inner planets were generated close enough to the boss for me to jump to it, except maybe one. But by the time I had visited every other inner planet only to find I couldn’t get to the boss, I could no longer travel to that one last inner planet. It didn’t look close enough to make it to me, but I would be pretty disappointed if some games were generated to be impossible from the start. If I could’ve seen the jump opportunities for traveling to a planet, I could’ve prevented the soft block assuming it was winnable.

The solar system view is on a tilted plane, making it hard to tell where players can (and cannot) jump to

It took me quite a few runs to complete Everything is Peachy, which is certainly the intention of the game. However, the gameplay felt repetitive after being only an hour in. The random generation of the planets didn’t make any of them feel unique. There were certainly combinations of objectives and hazards that were harder or objectives I was willing to work more for, but none of them made a lasting impression. The second phase of the final boss battle was also very repetitive and a big time sink, which discouraged me from playing again after beating it.

Starting the final boss!

Overall I found Everything is Peachy to be a cute and quick strategy game. It’s easy to learn with some diversity of controls. Unfortunately it quickly gets repetitive, with several inconvenient features which get in the player’s way and may soft block them from completing the game. I recommend Everything is Peachy to players looking for a quick, simple, and cute strategy game only if they’re relaxed enough to not get frustrated with the same aforementioned inconveniences or bored by the repetitive level design.

Find this game at the publisher’s website or on Steam.