Return from Core Review

Return from Core is an open-world survival crafting game with dating sim elements, developed by Tanxun Studio and published by Shochiku with 2P Games. I admit, I saw the title and decided to check it out because it reminded me of Core Keeper, a sort of “Why not?” kind of thing. As it turns out, there is quite a bit more to this game than just mining, crafting, and dating.

You play as Will, whose older brother, Carl, went missing three years ago while trying to find a way to the surface after living underground for all their lives. However, after setting off to find Carl, Will finds a mysterious girl with horns floating within a glass tank, created by humans and put to sleep 30 years ago. After awakening her, with the help of Lillith and a whole host of other Subjects, Will makes his dream of returning to the surface into a reality. Although, it seems Lillith has her own agenda she needs Will for.

I think the narrative is okay, although I didn't really get into it; It's serviceable for what it is. There are some dark moments, such as how the girls were tortured and experimented on, which is balanced out by the sweeter interactions that happen throughout the story and in the relationship events, but it does fall into the trappings of unamusing tropes like the dense protagonist and especially some of the fanservice. It's just cheap thrills for a game that doesn't get anywhere close to an 18+ rating (plenty of skeletons and blood, though). There is some nudity and some girls’ outfits are barely covering anything, but no matter how much skin is shown, I’m not going to get my rocks off over chibi designs.

This isn't helped by the not-so-great translation job from its native Chinese. It’s not unreadable by any means, but there are obvious grammatical and formatting errors in a bunch of the dialogue and tutorials with strange phrasings that did bother me quite a bit. At the very least, I liked the art style of the game: It’s cute, and the characters are well-animated (they somehow made a 2D character sashay).

But enough about that, let’s get into the gameplay. The tutorial will teach you some of the basics where you can mine material, craft a variety of equipment, and fight the various nightmarish (and not-so-nightmarish) creatures that infest the mines. If you’ve played Core Keeper, you’ve played Return from Core, except it has monster girl waifus you can rizz up. Gack! I think I just coughed up blood… Also, kinda getting a little too cheeky with the title there.

You can eventually automate everything, getting access to machines and letting the girls help out, turning the underground into a massive factory, so if you love Factorio or Satisfactory, you might get a kick out of this game. Getting access to electricity felt like a big leap forward.

However, the main draw to Return from Core is the monster girls or “Subjects” as they are called. They help you craft items, farm, and maintain your base, but you can also bring them along to help fight off the various creatures in the underground and conquer its dungeons. You might need to defeat them and befriend them before they join your base, though.

Treating them well, like supplying food, appealing to their favourite activities, and giving them gifts, will progress the relationship to higher and higher levels until you become their Beloved, while also learning more about the character and their backstory.

You can ignore it and treat them like slaves. It is very worrying that the default work setting is the one that involves no breaks and barely any time for food or sleep. I prefer treating them like people and not as sexy slave labour. You also get perks, exclusive items, and better prices for buying and selling when using their shop. You can even level them up to increase their stats and unlock new attacks, which seriously do help. I quite liked the system, even if I mostly ended up just giving them my junk items.

You can power yourself up, though, by using… drugs. Well, one character calls it drugs, but the items needed to unlock and upgrade skills are called “genetic potions”. They actually do make a serious difference with each upgrade, like being able to create shields and gain lifesteal, but I found the menu itself a little unfriendly. First off, outside of the initial six skills, the rest of the icons are a generic DNA symbol, which aren't intuitive to check at a glance. Also, it didn’t indicate that some alternate skills will be made unavailable if another one is unlocked. Finally, it’s hard to tell which of those skills you have purchased, because the only indicator is a slight glow.

Actually, I think I have the biggest problem with its UI and menus. There are just tons of them that can be annoying to navigate, with menus within menus that can be vague thanks to the aforementioned iffy translation. I also encountered some issues with the dialogue boxes themselves. If two or more NPCs are talking, their dialogue boxes can overlap with each other, which is annoying when you need to turn in quests or want to read what's going on with the girls. I don’t know what to click to advance dialogue or select what quest I want. There’s no indicator of what I’m clicking on, which feels bad. It's a minor thing, but I like everything to be tactile.

There is Steam Workshop support, but the few mods available right now are alternate outfits for the girls. Do you want Mona to dress up like a succubus or get Kochea out of that hospital gown and into a school-girl uniform? Well, I know the place for you!

Mechanically, Return from Core is a fine game. It's like comfort food (which I am stealing from Captain Chungus’ Steam review); it's not great for you by any means, but it's still enjoyable enough to see it through to the end. Mining and crafting are addicting endeavours, creating factories feels great, it's fun to explore the underground with a team of monster girls at your side, and improving the relationships with those girls is nice. I just wish it had a better story, cleaned up the dialogue, and a more intuitive UI.