One Hour One Life Forums

No, the magic hasn't been kept.
My daughter used to love playing, as did I. She tried to play on a mutual friends account when we were visiting them (I recommended the game to them) and couldn't even survive a single entire lifetime because of how convoluted the systems have gotten, just with eating alone. After some reflection, you probably don't understand this since you already KNOW the system instead of having to wiki for 5 hours just to make the game playable. We want a game, not a second or third job or research project. Its not like we can actually teach other players now since just surviving is now 80% of the game instead of creating, teaching and building.
Plus, the lack of new players show very well that magic was lost long ago. So do these dead forums. Well gone are the days where there were so many players new servers needed to be added. No one is gushing to their mate about this wonderful new game they found anymore. They buy it, find it so hard to get into that they drop it after a few lives leaving the player base the same numbers. The two times I heard it brought up in conversation in the last year it was the exact same sentiment. "Yeah, it USED to be good. Don't buy it though, not worth it now." I haven't heard of a new player outside reddit talking about it in over a year. Even then that's usually to suggest yet another grind or griefing complaint or suggestion. I find it strange that 2HOL has more of a regular playerbase than the original game, which in itself SHOULD be a giant red flag.
Just using the reviews isn't a very good gauge since its usually only either the REALLY pissed off players who would complain or the far more likely vets who keep trying to find workarounds for the updates. Most who don't like the game play it a bit, find it too hard to play and drop it forever into the greyed out steam box, never to be played again without ever even bothering to click the reviews.

There's a reason I stopped playing this game years ago, the complaints have been in the same track since 2018 and the designer ignores them, will literally tell the ONLY few people left in the game's forum that everyone's experiences are invalid and basically aren't real and the game we can all see the issues with is fine while we're STILL waiting for the updates which were promised in its trailer to make progression possible and interesting.
It's rather sad, since I came back to see if the game had been improved only to find even less players since the race update and the grind only increased for who knows what reason.
What's even sadder about that is those new players will get less and less over the months and years, meaning less money for Jason to work on fixing the game. Which in turn has already brought on the loss of regular players (which the forums have made clear was happening) which will eventually kill the game. After all, if he really wanted to know how vet players don't get bored, he could've listened to the forums a few years back. Or actually gone into the game and watch all the silly and stupid stuff we all did, like the cults, pre-family families, evil aunts and godsent uncles to find out.
I loved the idea of legacy and teaching in a multiplayer survival game, but gotta say, I've become extremely disappointed in the result. After years, I feel like I was mislead by the trailer, the promises of fixes and updates after buying the product and the portrayed ideas which got me to shell out the cash. Like most of the players were saying a few years ago, Jason needed help THEN if he wanted to really expand the game to what he wanted. By now its too late I think.
In all honesty, I don't think I'll be buying another game with Rohrer in the head dev team names again or recommending them after how this has turned out.