I was initially put off by bad reviews that this game has accrued upon launch, but decided to give it a shot on a friend's recommendation. It was decently discounted during the steam Autumn sale, so I thought… why not?
No regrets. This was a very fun (if somewhat frustrating at times) experience.
How It Begins
The basic premise is that your character (an unnamed fella with a magnificent beard, simply referred to as the Keeper) has died. Was hit by a car on the way home from the grocery store, to be more precise. He then wakes up, has a brief chat with a dark and mysterious stranger and is rather unceremoniously dumped into his new home with the instructions to find and dig up Gerry - a talking, alcoholic, amnesiac skull who will serve as his guide. In the meantime, he (and by extension you, the player) will need to assume the position of the Graveyard Keeper, first just to stay afloat, then as a way to get resources needed to send him back home, to his love.
Stardew Graveyard?
Comparisons to Stardew Valley are entirely unavoidable - while there are significant differences between the two, they both have very similar gameplay concepts. In both, you are a new arrival in a mysterious community and have to start from scratch on an old, overgrown farm/graveyard. Both feature 2D pixel graphics and similar crafting/gathering. Both demand patience and good time and resource management and offer a pretty chill, relaxing gameplay loops.
The main differences are the change of focus from farming (and having to account for seasons and weather) to graveyard keeping (dictated by the rhythm of corpse arrivals, decay timers, and days of the week), a different mood - still somewhat light-hearted, but less wholesome (what do you expect from a game prominently featuring alcohol and dead bodies?), and a robust technology tree.
What To Do, Or Gameplay
You will typically split your time between gathering resources (such as wood, stones, and plants), building new structures (crafting stations, graveyard improvements), crafting advanced items at these stations, and managing corpses. There is also a bit of farming, fishing and dungeon crawling. Occasionally you’ll need to visit the nearby village, either to talk to one of the characters or to do some shopping.
At the start of the game, your actions during a day are very limited - you run out of energy very quickly and have to sleep to regain it. Later you’ll craft items (food and alcohol) that will help you work for longer.
Your main task and source of income (at least at the beginning) is taking care of your graveyard. This involves fixing old graves, preparing new corpses for burial by embalming them and cutting out some parts, and then burying them and decorating the gravesite with fences and gravestones - at first just with rudimentary wooden crosses, later on with elaborate marble sculptures.
Every corpse has certain stats, represented by red and white skulls. Generally, you’ll want to remove as many red skulls as you can and increase the white skull count (for example by draining blood, cutting out the fat or injecting the body with special embalming fluids). Botching a corpse (either by making a poor judgment or failing at surgery) is not the end of the world - you can just harvest it for anything useful and then either cremate it or dump it in the river. And then you can make parchment out of the harvested skin, oil out of fat, and pack the meat up and sell it to a local innkeeper. Or make burgers out of it. It’s that kind of game.
Corpses also decay and loose white skulls as a result, so you should always be vigilant and watch out for new deliveries.
You are not rewarded for trying to act ethically - even more, breaking down a bunch of corpses is required for progress. The only act the game warns you about is throwing bodies into the river, but I’m unsure if there are any actual consequences.
Soon enough you’ll be able to unlock a small vegetable garden and grow some veggies. This is a bad idea early on - without a basic fertilizer, you will always loose seeds and have to buy more from the farmer. Farming itself is quite simple - you mark a plot of farmland, choose fertilizers and seeds, hit okay and then just harvest a few days later. No need to till the soil or water your crops.
You’ll also get access to a church, which you’ll have to build furniture for and perform sermons at every 6th day. Sermons are a decent source of early income and give you an otherwise inaccessible resource - Faith, which is needed to study items and create works of art (books, sculptures, jewellery).
All of these locations (graveyard, church, garden but also your workyard, morgue, and basements) have a limited amount of usable space for furniture, storage, and crafting stations. This is the first major issue - there is no way to preview how much space future structures will take, or even what else you’ll need to build in a location. You can’t move anything you’ve built, and deconstructing only gives you about half of the resources you’ve put in, so reorganizing your workspace (which you’ll probably need to do at some point, once you’re more familiar with the game and know which stations need to be close to each other) will cost you a lot of time and resources.
Another problem which appears at this point is that there is no recipe book. Need to build a new table but forgot how many planks you need? Either take 20 just in case or go all the way back to your storage area because you forgot one. I’d recommend either taking detailed notes of all the recipes or opening the wiki. Same goes for crafting. The saving grace is that all storage spaces within an area are connected to nearby work stations, so you don’t need to search through your chests every time you want to craft something.
Early game gathering is fine - there is an abundance of trees and stones scattered around, but sooner rather than later you’ll start running into problems - trees regrow very slowly and new stones don’t appear at all. Large resources (blocks of stone, logs) have to be carried back to your home one by one (or usually in twos, you can take advantage of the physics and just kinda kick a huge block of stone back to storage). The solution to this comes from one of the recent updates, which added zombies as a way to automate some more grindy parts of resource gathering. I’ve spent surprising amounts of time min-maxing the perfect zombo. As a bonus, they are absolutely adorable, especially when jogging with huge backpacks full of resources. I’d definitely recommend getting into the whole zombie business sooner rather than later, it’ll save you from hours of the worst kind of grind. A lot of the earlier reviews considered this game to be unacceptably grindy and the zombies were a fantastic addition to deal with this.
The majority of crafting recipes have to be first unlocked through the technology tree. It is split into 7 distinct categories such as Building, Theology or Farming. To unlock a tech, you need to spend research points (red, green or blue) which you can obtain from just working (mostly red points) or studying items. This is another area of the game which seems to demand clairvoyance from the player - a technology that you’ve spent hours unlocking might prove to be entirely useless because it requires a resource you need another tech to obtain.
One exception to unlocking recipes is the alchemy system - you can convert most biological resources into powders, extracts and solutions and then mix them to create various potions and reagents. This sounds fine on paper, but the ratio of actual, working recipes to the number of possible combinations is… very unfavorable. In previous versions of the game, you’d just get completely useless Goo for trying a non-existent combination, but in one of the recent versions the system was changed slightly - now you can get special goo which will give you a hint to the actual recipe. Combined powder of health and solution of acceleration and got a blood goo out of it? Maybe try to combine powder of health and blood.
This new system works pretty well for 2 ingredient recipes, I was able to get most of them just from experimentation. 3 ingredient recipes remain a random mess that you’re better off just looking up on the wiki.
And possibly the biggest issue with the game overall - walking and waiting. You will have to walk a lot, and some parts of the map feel designed to spite the player, with fences, walls and cliffs preventing diagonal movement. Early on, a trip to the village (or, even worse, the lighthouse) is a proper expedition due to the distances involved and a rather speedy flow of time. Fortunately, there are underground tunnels which you can unlock relatively early and which significantly shorten your trips. There is also a teleport stone, which you can buy from the Innkeeper for 2 silver. It has a lengthy cooldown but it’s *unlimited use*, and definitely one of the best early purchases.
Waiting is, unfortunately, harder to mitigate. The game world has a 6 day week, and every day a different important character comes to the village. You need to finish their storylines to finish the game and unlock certain technologies, but it sometimes gets very frustrating when you’ve either missed a character by seconds and have to wait a week (about half an hour of real time) or they request that you meet with another person, who arrives in 4 days, then go meet someone else in 3 and then come back to them.
This is not helped by the quest log - or a lack thereof. You have a menu screen of important characters which also notes any requests related to them. You can’t sort these, characters which you haven’t met yet don’t appear (even if you have a quest related to them) and not all important information is logged, so you better pay attention to what the characters are saying. Maybe even take notes.
So far that has been an impressive amount of flaws and downsides, but this game can consume a week of your life if you think you can put up with all these issues and decide to give it a chance.
The fun comes largely from checking things off a checklist, watching numbers go up (mostly in the graveyard and on individual corpses), planning new expansions and, finally, sometimes after a couple of hours, getting them done. There is a decent sense of achievement with each new unlock, and the road to every new milestone is filled with rather soothing, repetitive actions, drawing you into a state of meditative calm. I’ve found the experience most enjoyable when I was not doing quests or making long-term plans, but just cutting some wood, making planks, getting distracted by the arrival of a new corpse, going to check it out and maybe start the injection process, then getting distracted by needing more paper for a zombie writing books in my basement, then remembering that I’ll need a new gravestone for the newest client, then forgetting all about that and going fishing for a bit. And then remembering that it’s the local equivalent of a Sunday and I have to give a sermon and oh god where did I put the candles and the sun is setting and how am I out of incense again???
The three groups I’d most recommend this game to are people trying to unwind and listen to some podcasts while gaming, min-maxers - they can calculate the optimal graveyard layout and try to perfect all of their zombies, and completionists - every achievement can be obtained in one run (careful though, there are 3 missable ones), and most will come naturally just from playing the game.
Technicalities
The game world is rendered in a rather pretty and detailed 2D pixel art style. The characters are distinctive, the UI quite clear and readable. The sounds and music are… fine? They were there, but I didn’t notice them much during almost 50 hours spent with the game. Except for the circular saw, using that was torturous… which is realistic, I guess. The only track I can actually recall is the main menu theme. There is no voice acting - everyone just makes vaguely speech-like noises while text scrolls through the screen.
I’ve ran into a few minor bugs, and all of them were resolved easily by going to bed to advance the time or by saving and loading the game. I’ve played on the PC, and from what I’ve heard that’s easily the best platform - console versions (Switch in particular) seem to be more buggy.
I’d also recommend playing with a controller, it’s the kind of game where it’s good to just sit back on a comfy sofa and relax, and there is no precise aiming that you have to do.
Stranger Sins DLC - more booze, fewer corpses
After playing for a few hours with just the base game and enjoying it, I’ve decided to grab the DLC too. It adds, according to the devs, about 10-12 hours of gameplay. I’d call that a relatively accurate estimate.
The two main features are a story about a time machine and a new building - a tavern for you to run.
The time machine will give you a lot of lore and backstory that’s either completely skipped over or barely hinted at in the main campaign. To actually use it, you need to gather artifacts from the villagers - and nobody just wants to hand their heirloom in. This part of the dlc is basically a series of elaborate fetch quests punctuated with short cutscenes. I’ve played through the majority of it close to the end of the game, and it was a mistake - all the running around would have been much more bearable if I spread it out more. I was tired enough from the running that I don’t think I’ve properly appreciated some of the writing - the quests are tiring and ridiculous but in a funny way, and add some depth to the villagers who have, so far, have only been vendors. The increasingly contrived ways to obtain artifacts are even lampshaded by your character, who seemed to be as tired of this as I was by the end.
The tavern is somewhat more similar to the rest of the game - you have to get it built first, and then provide alcohol for daily operations, cook food for events and build new tables and upgrades. It is rather disappointingly streamlined, with no way to deviate from a pre-planned layout and new features only unlocked through progressing the time machine storyline. The upside is that selling gold star wine is by far the best moneymaker in the game and I was pleasantly surprised that my automated wine and beer production lines actually struggled to keep up with the demands of thirsty customers.
Overall, I’d say that I enjoyed the DLC less than the main game, but it’s pretty cheap even without any discounts. If you’re curious about the world and enjoy the basic gameplay loop, you can probably give it a shot - especially since it will be a while before you’re able to access the DLC content, so you don’t have to decide right from the get-go.
Largely Non-Spoilery Beginner Tips:
- Get the Teleportation Stone from the Innkeeper as soon as you can. You can teleport while holding something (like a log, corpse or a zombie).
- Your primary focus at the start should be on unlocking the Church and getting Iron Tools.
- Watch out for important dialogue information, maybe even take notes.
- Zombies are love, zombies are life.
- Try out the alchemy system, but remember that it’s fine to just look up the combinations on the wiki if you find it tedious. You can also buy a lot of the finished products from a vendor.
- Wiki is love, wiki is life. Checking out the recipes on the wiki will save you a lot of walking back and forth because you didn’t remember how many nails you needed to take from storage.
- Regularly check in with the vendors and try to sell them stuff/buy stuff from them to upgrade them. You can buy almost every item in the game from a vendor, you just might have to upgrade them first.
- Really, don’t bother with farming without fertilizer.
- Stockpile about 20 skulls. Just… trust me on this.
A Sad Tale of Missable Achievements - A Cautionary Tale for Completionists
This is a surprisingly easy and satisfying game to 100%. If you enjoy the basic gameplay loop and don’t just beeline it through the story, you will easily get around 70 to 80% of all the available achievements, and the others won’t be too far off. The ones that will likely take you the most time are the fish related ones (catch 200 fish, catch a Goldfish - which you only have about a 5% chance of catching at best) and the DLC tavern event organization ones (organize 15 events, organize gold star events). It is also entirely possible to get all the achievements in one playthrough.
But.
There is one slight issue.
There are 3 achievements which are entirely missable - not well-hidden or anything, but completely unavailable until you start a new game if you mess them up. I’ll list them here, for anyone wanting to do a full playthrough:
- He Trusted You - towards the end of the Inquisitor’s questline he will ask you for proof of cultist activity. When the dialogue option comes up, tell him about Gerry. Don’t worry, nothing will come out of it.
- Alchemist achievements - apparently only recipes discovered through experimentation count towards this achievement, and not the ones you get through Alchemy Recipe item, so only use them once you have the achievements.
- Best Seller - this is the one that got me. At some point of his questline you need to provide the Astrologer with a silver quality book, and then gold quality book. You can hand him research notes for obsidian instead of the silver book. DON’T DO THIS, he will not ask for the gold book anymore and you will not be able to get the achievement.
Submitted December 05, 2019 at 10:04PM by Karaeir https://ift.tt/2LpJlof
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