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Is that the series with extremely questionable "romance" options or am I confusing it with a different Japanese farm sim?
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Mar 7, 2023 12:28
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Jack Trades posted:Is that the series with extremely questionable "romance" options or am I confusing it with a different Japanese farm sim? Rune Factory 4 is the one with the "oh no, even though she acts like she's 8, she's an adult, wink wink, nudge nudge" character. Anyways, thank you all for the advice! I picked up RF5 and am going to try it out.
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Mar 7, 2023 15:47
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Neat looking RPGMaker merchant lifesim just came out: https://twitter.com/FinalProfitRPG/status/1632833433909985284 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1705140/Final_Profit_A_Shop_RPG/ There's a demo; I'll check it out eventually.
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Mar 7, 2023 17:58
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$14.99 for an RPGmaker game with no other history of releases on Steam? Interesting concept tho. Free Market hoooo!
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Mar 8, 2023 01:16
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Metis of the Hallway posted:Yeah I think the writing and gameplay of RF5 are still as charming as the previous games, but it definitely suffered transitioning to 3D. But if you enjoyed RF4 and want to play another one -- it's definitely worth it at half price imo. The combat isn't as fluid in 5 in that you can't cancel animations into a dash as easily or readily, and a lot of animations end somewhat stiffly. It's not bad enough to be unplayable by any means, but RF4 has much nicer combat. Jack Trades posted:Is that the series with extremely questionable "romance" options or am I confusing it with a different Japanese farm sim? There's always at least one "romance" option that is indefensible, and it's the biggest blight on the series. The actual farming and dungeon mechanics are wonderful. The characters are fun, and there's a hell of a lot of dialogue that rarely repeats itself as well. The moment someone copies the formula and strips out the skeevy bullshit, I will be incredibly, incredibly happy. Sadly, Harvestella, while similar in a lot of ways, doesn't have the depth to the farming or the combat that makes the RF series as good as it is.
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Mar 8, 2023 02:55
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Okay, so I grabbed Sun Haven as well since it was finally out of Early Access, and I'm pretty tepid about it. It's very similar to Stardew Valley if SV was created by a Korean MMORPG shop: everything takes ten times longer than it should. Like, you go to the mines (as in SV) and you mine out copper (as in SV) so that you can smelt it into bars (as in SV) to make new tools (though you can make them yourself, unlike SV where you pay a guy to do it). But in Sun Haven, there are fewer copper nodes in each mine level, so it takes more time to get the same copper ore. And then they smelt to bars at 3:1, so you're getting a third of the materials from the same amount of ore, which again, you're getting less of. And now you have three armor slots to fill, so you actually need more copper bars to keep up with the game. And that's kind of where everything in the game goes. You need to chop down more trees to get more lumber to get one of the twenty machines that do things that an SV workbench does. You need to grind a few hundred monsters to get your character's skills up to where they can survive the fourth screen in the wilderness. You need to navigate conversation trees with neighbors and tell them what they want to hear because just talking to them doesn't raise friendship levels. The main plot involves a crap-ton of running back and forth between the same two or three people to relay messages. I mean, it's not all bad- there's a lot more: more crops to grow, more furniture to make and decorate with, more food to make, more ways to customize your character and make them unique in look and skills... it's just that it's slow to do all of those things, and it seems that every time you make a bit of progress some random event comes that stops you until you dig out from under it. I just made it through the first season to summer, and the mine is now randomly blocked and I need to pay 4 iron bars to re-open it, which is hard to get when the mine is blocked. I mean, it's not impossible, but it'll be expensive because I have to just go buy the stuff, and that means less money for everything else. It's definitely a game that makes your success feel hard-earned, at least.
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Mar 17, 2023 22:12
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I feel like it balances out the lack of an energy bar. If everything happened as fast as Stardew valley it would be unbalanced. Been playing with my wife and it's definitely scratched the SV co-op itch.
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Mar 17, 2023 22:28
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skeleton warrior posted:Okay, so I grabbed Sun Haven as well since it was finally out of Early Access, and I'm pretty tepid about it. It's very similar to Stardew Valley if SV was created by a Korean MMORPG shop: everything takes ten times longer than it should. Mining gets a lot faster as you get more levels and mining talents. Mid-game I was able to consistently gather all the metal from 10 min levels a day. Deeper mine levels have more good rocks (and also more dangerous enemies). I don't remember the mine closing, that is a jerk move. If you haven't already bought the iron bars, I think they can drop from chests (of which there are reliably 1-2 across all the beach maps each day) The conversational trees are especially annoying because you can lose relationship points if you pick the wrong thing. At least you can still give gifts. My main complaint with the game is that it's very keyboard/mouse focused. They added controller support at some point but it's still pretty clunky.
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Mar 17, 2023 23:38
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LLSix posted:Mining gets a lot faster as you get more levels and mining talents. Mid-game I was able to consistently gather all the metal from 10 min levels a day. Deeper mine levels have more good rocks (and also more dangerous enemies). I don't remember the mine closing, that is a jerk move. If you haven't already bought the iron bars, I think they can drop from chests (of which there are reliably 1-2 across all the beach maps each day) They do, thank you! That got me enough that I didn't have to spend any money on it. Of course, while attempting to explore the beach, it turns out that there's another loving snorlax that has popped up to block passage between my house and the combat beach, so lol, lmfao I'm also half-way through the mining skill chart and still haven't gotten to room 10 because everything just take so long to do. Also, despite having installed the latest patch that they swears fixes it, pests still eat my crops protected by scarecrows. I get that this scratches the SV itch, and maybe I keep loving around with it for that reason, but it really feels like they made a bunch of design decisions without thinking through in any way whether it made the game more fun or more playable. Like, it is a serious annoyance that I have trouble telling if a patch of ground is watered or not, especially when there's a tree in front of it. It feels like being clear about that should be just the most basic design decision for user friendliness, and they just didn't bother. Quests pop up with no thought about whether I can get the resources they need, or tell me to go to a place by name with no way on the map to determine what the name means or references. Time spent in conversation and looking at your inventory and managing your inventory is not paused, so gently caress you if you're trying to figure out which things need to be shipped at 11pm. I just find it overall frustrating and grindy compared to SV's chillness.
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Mar 18, 2023 02:20
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So many stardew clones are so much more tedious and grindy, I’m not sure why it’s such a common thing.
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Mar 18, 2023 04:29
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Honestly, charm is a much harder target to hit than CPU utilization.
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Mar 18, 2023 05:03
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Talorat posted:So many stardew clones are so much more tedious and grindy, I’m not sure why it’s such a common thing. Because they how to compensate for lack of 10 years of content somehow.
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Mar 18, 2023 07:32
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I wanted to give Coral Island a try, but it has now crashed three times in three different spots on the first day and I don't know if I can make myself sit through the first day intro again.
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Mar 21, 2023 03:38
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I picked Sun Haven back up now that it's released and I can't quite put my finger on what exactly isn't that compelling about it. There's a lot of content, but much of it feels really disjointed. It's really easy to see the seams where new content was added, and the two additional towns are more or less completely self-contained and siloed away from everything else. There's also no seasonal crops in those towns, which feels really weird when contrasted against the seasonal crops in the main town of Sun Haven. There's also a weird emphasis on wasting the player's time because there's no stamina, so the balancing factor is how slowly things go initially and how much faster you can work later on (tool swing speed goes up as the quality of tool increases). Thing is, that still means you need to click once with the hoe to till the soil, and then once with the watering can to water the crop each day. There's no sprinklers as far as I can tell, and while you do eventually get spells that let you spend mana to get a bunch of work done at once, those also feel underwhelming. The seed maker costs mana to use and takes 40 loving hours to make a batch of seeds (I modded the crafting time very quickly because holy crap is that a design decision that I do not agree with), so if you want to run your farm as a self-sustaining operation, you don't really have mana to run the spells to make farming less of a pain in the rear end. Mining is initially quite fun, but finding ore is very RNG dependent, as sometimes you'll go to a floor and it'll have 10-20 ore nodes, and sometimes it'll have 0-2 ore nodes. There's a huge amount of ore required to get anything done as well, between making keys to progress in the mines and making keys to unlock chests on the overworld, and that's before spending ore to upgrade your stuff. There are also mines available in the two other towns, and the perks you get in the mining tree for the Sun Haven mines don't work in the mines for the other two towns because reasons. Fishing is another thing that feels somewhat disjointed (which, to be fair, is true in many, many titles) and like it doesn't integrate with the rest of the systems. It's there, it's functional, and that's about all there is to it. Credit where it's due though, the skill trees are designed decently well, and while there are certainly some garbage skills, they did a good job with making skills that are somewhat interesting. I also like the food system - many foods give a permanent stat increase upon eating them. The stat increase starts very large, and then quickly plateaus and maxes out at 100 of an item consumed (the bulk of this is in the first 5-10 consumed though, so you don't need to feel compelled to eat 100 of every item). And that food system is really cool, right up until you realized that the devs bloated the everliving gently caress out of the crafting system and added a bunch of foods that don't increase stats, so now you have to sort through pages and pages of recipes to see what you want to do, and time doesn't pause in the crafting menu. There is, thankfully, a mod that lets you craft from chests and quick sort to chests, so it could be worse. On the bright side, there's a lot of NPCs scattered across the three towns, and a lot of dialogue for each of the characters. There's a lot of options for making characters, for clothes, and for decorating each of the three farms and houses in different ways. There's also a pretty heavy emphasis on non-human characters, so if you're into that, go nuts. I'd say it's a good sandbox game to approach from a very chill perspective where you just want to relax and vibe with your NPC buddies and progress very slowly. There's not a lot of mechanical meat to it, and gameplay-wise, Rune Factory or Stardew Valley trump it in every way possible. I think overall the game's big issue is that it just lacks focus. There's a lot of stuff, but 99% of it is just fluff and cruft that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. That's exacerbated by the three towns being so disjointed from one another to the point where their crafting materials aren't shared from town to town, their NPCs don't interact, and it's just very siloed in an uncomfortable way. The game is also very grindy, in large part to paper over how mechanically simple it is and the lack of a stamina system. The player resource is, quite literally, time, and boy howdy are they determined to waste it.
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Mar 23, 2023 20:31
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I also feel that Sun Haven is - fine. It's fine. I love the world but dislike the character designs. For every one thing I really like there's one thing I really don't.
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Mar 23, 2023 21:40
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Dirk the Average posted:I think overall the game's big issue is that it just lacks focus. There's a lot of stuff, but 99% of it is just fluff and cruft that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. That's exacerbated by the three towns being so disjointed from one another to the point where their crafting materials aren't shared from town to town, their NPCs don't interact, and it's just very siloed in an uncomfortable way. The game is also very grindy, in large part to paper over how mechanically simple it is and the lack of a stamina system. The player resource is, quite literally, time, and boy howdy are they determined to waste it. Yeah, I agree with everything you've said here. I kept playing it, and then I finally made it to a second town where they said "hey, stop working on THAT town, and come and do the exact same stuff over in THIS town" and knowing that there's a THIRD town out there which will do the same thing, I just stopped playing.
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Mar 23, 2023 21:42
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skeleton warrior posted:Yeah, I agree with everything you've said here. I kept playing it, and then I finally made it to a second town where they said "hey, stop working on THAT town, and come and do the exact same stuff over in THIS town" and knowing that there's a THIRD town out there which will do the same thing, I just stopped playing. Yeah, and I forgot to mention that each town has their own currency. It's very clearly the influence of a system where they didn't want to use the same currency because then the players who had already been playing in the first town and had all the things would be able to just roll up and afford everything in the new town immediately. Then they couldn't add too many food items that boosted stats to the new towns because they already had a full set in the original town, so the bulk of items you can craft with the new stuff doesn't actually boost your stats the way the original town stuff does, and the issues just kind of compound on themselves. HopperUK posted:I also feel that Sun Haven is - fine. It's fine. I love the world but dislike the character designs. For every one thing I really like there's one thing I really don't. And yeah, fine is definitely a way I'd put it as well. I think if it were one of my first games in the genre and I were a lot younger and had more free time to dedicate to only one game, I'd get a lot more out of slowly grinding out the perfect farm and boosting my stats.
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Mar 23, 2023 21:50
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Dirk the Average posted:And that food system is really cool, right up until you realized that the devs bloated the everliving gently caress out of the crafting system and added a bunch of foods that don't increase stats, so now you have to sort through pages and pages of recipes to see what you want to do, and time doesn't pause in the crafting menu. There is, thankfully, a mod that lets you craft from chests and quick sort to chests, so it could be worse. That's really disappointing to hear. That's a pretty recent change too. For the longest time, every crafted food item raised your stats. So there was a whole layer of the game where you could just spend tens of hours making all the different foods to supercharge your stats. It was completely unnecessary but it made for an engaging victory lap.
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Mar 24, 2023 01:06
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LLSix posted:I wanted to give Coral Island a try, but it has now crashed three times in three different spots on the first day and I don't know if I can make myself sit through the first day intro again. I think you just got insanely unlucky having it happen like that, I've had a few crashes in the past 4-5 days since I picked it up, but they're not terribly common for me. You can also skip the intro by holding F, which the game helpfully never mentions (unless I missed it?). The gameplay is almost straight-up a copy of Stardew Valley, you do basically the same things but some added stuff like Diving and a more environmental focus (you do a lot of clean-up while diving. a lot.), and the townsfolk are all interesting people and every eligible partner is ridiculously attractive (I had an out of body experience meeting a few lol), the art style is really good at that soft lilo & stitch aesthetic, which I really enjoy. Once this is fully out of EA it should be really great, because it's really good right now, with only half of the planned stuff done. If you enjoy Stardew Valley, this is more of the same with more modern graphics and aesthetics, and the island has some great places to check out.
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Mar 25, 2023 10:39
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Since fishing is mentioned in the title, figured I'd give this game a mention. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1562430/DREDGE/ Not out yet but the demo has some promising reviews, so it might be worth keeping an eye on for a launch sale. Looks to be a fishing sim where you dodge the occasional sea monster and slowly uncover some sort of supernatural mystery.
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Mar 25, 2023 11:52
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Yeah, all the publications already reviewed it: https://opencritic.com/game/14348/dredge Looks pretty fun.
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Mar 25, 2023 12:09
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I picked up Rune Factory 4s at the recommendations for my Steam Deck in the sale. This game is great and super chill so far. I own but never really played both Stardew Valley and My Time At Portia. Are those two games pretty similar in content to the Rune Factory series?
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Mar 25, 2023 15:50
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Well, they scratch the same itch but they each do their own thing.
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Mar 25, 2023 16:09
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Richlove posted:I picked up Rune Factory 4s at the recommendations for my Steam Deck in the sale. This game is great and super chill so far. I own but never really played both Stardew Valley and My Time At Portia. Yes. They're the three best games in their genre. They focus on different things though. Rune Factory is the most focused on combat. Stardew Valley is the most focused on farming. Portia is a bit unusual in that it focuses on quests that are mostly about building things but is still super chill.
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Mar 25, 2023 17:11
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cough also try Dragon Quest Builders 2 cough
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Mar 25, 2023 17:20
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Megazver posted:cough also try Dragon Quest Builders 2 cough It is really cute.
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Mar 25, 2023 17:29
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Megazver posted:cough also try Dragon Quest Builders 2 cough Even as someone who never played more than twenty minutes of a DQ game prior to Builders, I got sucked right in. Great series, I hope they'll make more.
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Mar 25, 2023 17:34
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LLSix posted:Yes. They're the three best games in their genre. They focus on different things though. Rune Factory is the most focused on combat. Stardew Valley is the most focused on farming. Portia is a bit unusual in that it focuses on quests that are mostly about building things but is still super chill. Unless Portia has massively improved since the last time I played I wouldn't call it "best" anything. Floaty movement, boring characters, glitchy everything, it was a big disappointment for me.
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Mar 25, 2023 19:59
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quote:How a video game has revolutionised the way farmers are buying tractors This is really cool. quote:Giants, based in Switzerland, told the Observer that interest from manufacturers provides it with enough of a revenue stream to cover the costs of game development. “In the beginning, we had to ask manufacturers to be included in the game,” said Wolfgang Ebert, Giants’ marketing manager. “Today, we have to consider who we can integrate and what benefit there is to the game – we have many, many brands waiting to be included.” And this is amazing. Giants basically get the game paid for with the licensing deals from manufacturers to be included. The game is essentially an advertisment of professional equipment, and having played a lot of it, I don't feel like the game actually suffers for it. Certainly not with the amount of mods for it Giants includes on their website, mods from creators that Giants tests themselves for functionality.
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Mar 25, 2023 20:54
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lunar detritus posted:Unless Portia has massively improved since the last time I played I wouldn't call it "best" anything. Floaty movement, boring characters, glitchy everything, it was a big disappointment for me. Much like it's currently EA sequel, My Time at Sandrock, My Time at Portia started out as an EA game so it's possible it was glitchy at one point. I've played it through twice in the last few years and haven't noticed any glitches. I enjoy the movement options. You can walk, run, or roll. There are jumping puzzles and twoish types of mounts. One of which is a cute colored lama and another is wearing absolutely ridiculous sunglasses. That's more than most of these kinds of games offer. The characters got more fleshed out over time, but I wouldn't say the writing changed substantially. If you didn't like it then you probably won't like it now, and that's fine. People can like different things.
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Mar 25, 2023 21:20
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LLSix posted:Much like it's currently EA sequel, My Time at Sandrock, My Time at Portia started out as an EA game so it's possible it was glitchy at one point. I've played it through twice in the last few years and haven't noticed any glitches. It's definitely somewhat janky and I hear the console ports still have a lot of issues that will now remain unfixed, but I played on PC and I am willing to tolerate a bit of jank from a first-time indie dev.
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Mar 25, 2023 21:30
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Portia is very janky and has issues, but it's incredibly satisfying how you basically build up the whole world from scratch. And then you're seeing the results of your work and progress everywhere in the game as you go.
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Mar 25, 2023 21:49
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DQ2 is a cute game, but does it ever open up? So far I've been bossed around by a murderous skeleton, a red head so bratty she makes the god of destruction seem reasonable, and a hairy hermit. Do you ever get to make your own decisions or does it remain basically a puzzle game?
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Mar 25, 2023 22:12
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LLSix posted:DQ2 is a cute game, but does it ever open up? So far I've been bossed around by a murderous skeleton, a red head so bratty she makes the god of destruction seem reasonable, and a hairy hermit. Do you ever get to make your own decisions or does it remain basically a puzzle game? It does switch it up, and you won't have to wait too terribly long either. Each stage is relatively on rails, but between stages (and after you've completed the story) you go to your main base on the central island area where you can build whatever you want however you want. There are a few big projects on the island that it holds your hand through, and when you've completed them you can change them up or even tear them down. The central island also has lists of tasks (like, build a restaurant) that are fairly open-ended that you can do to get additional item blueprints and stuff like that. It's actually a pretty decent mix, it's not entirely structured and it's not entirely unstructured either. There are also mini-islands you can explore to unlock unlimited quantities of basic materials so that you don't constantly have to go farm things like wood and stone, you can just spawn them in your inventory. I really should play through that game again.
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Mar 25, 2023 22:22
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Thanks for your responses. I found out that I own DQ Builders 2 in my steam library as well! Looks like I have a ton of building and farming to do.
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Mar 26, 2023 14:05
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Just finished Graveyard Keeper, with 63h clocked, and that includes completing the stories from all 3 DLCs. Played it blind with no looking up the wiki, which certainly delayed me at some points, but the figuring out stuff was a lot of the fun and matched the ludicrous premise: you live in the modern world and get run over by a car one evening, only to be sent by some Death figure to be the "Graveyard Keeper" in a medieval world which gets weirder the more you learn about it. Everyone respects your title and assumes you know your poo poo when in fact your character, like the player, is just trying to figure it out. The game has neat stories weaved into the life sim gameplay, with stories/quests occasionally unlocking new technologies and providing you with even more stuff to look into. The meat of the game consists in dead body management, burying bodies and decorating the graves to improve the graveyard's quality score. This also provides a basic income. Woodworking and stone carving are obvious activities since they directly help with graves. And then you get into metalsmithing, farming, dungeon crawling, alchemy, organ harvesting, giving mass, running a tavern... And that's before DLC stories get started. There's a fair bunch of stuff in there, and the DLCs are well designed to mis into the normal gameplay, providing extra resources or alternative means of getting some quest items. Crafting trees are juuuust deep enough to be interesting and have you work out from quality ingredients for that high-end final product, yet remain simple enough that it never gets too tedious. At some point, you also unlock some automation technologies which considerably streamline a lot of the basics. Unlike many life sims, the game has a clear end with the story, but by the point you reach that, you have definitely seen pretty much all the game has to offer, and your production chains are mostly automated and there isn't room for or a point to giant expansion anyhow. Lovely game overall, although probably not too replayable as far as I'm concerned. I can't imagine going through it again already knowing all game mechanics and stories. Make sure you grab the whole package with all DLCs if you decide to head into it, they add a lot both story and gameplay wise.
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Mar 26, 2023 15:27
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Has anyone played Fishing Paradiso? Or Luna's Fishing Garden?
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Mar 30, 2023 11:57
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Luna's Fishing Garden was alright
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Mar 30, 2023 12:16
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Megazver posted:Has anyone played Fishing Paradiso? Or Luna's Fishing Garden? Yeah Luna's Fishing Garden is a 'smaller' game but it's very cute and relaxing, I liked it.
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Mar 30, 2023 12:37
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I played the demo of Fishing Paradiso, and it's fine. I'd call it more of a time waster than a game as the mechanics are simple enough that I was already a little bored after playing the demo for awhile.
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Mar 30, 2023 12:48
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