The way I got dragged into this game was by my former friends who noticed I play Stardew Valley like a mad man "It's stardew but eerie".
Played this game around february this year, the first few hours were interesting... but I was not prepared for the grind fest this game has.
They probably look at the hydra concept and decided to put it in this game, if you want to create wine for example get ready to do multiple steps:
-First the inquisitor, he only appears on wrath day so if you're on the wrong day you have to wait. You need to give give him gold/silver star burgers (if I recall) and some wine.
-to get burgers you need to invest into skill trees, cooking specifically. Not a big deal you get tech points by playing the game, but the burger recipe requires onions, preferably gold/silver quality.
-To get such quality you need to further invest into alchemy to make solutions and turn them into growth enhancers then you get onions from the farmer (South from the windmill), plant them and wait.
-To get silver wine, you need a bunch of stuff. You need grape seeds which you can either buy from the merchant or has a small chance to drop from the dungeons. Apply the same fertilizer to the grape seeds and wait. After harvest you get yourself the grapes and turn them into a pail of grape juice made at a vine press. Then after you get your silver quality pail of juice you'll need a wine making barrel. You get all of these via tech trees which depending on what you're doing in game, might take forever to grind the points.
This is just one example, basically in a nutshell if you want to do something you'll need to do five other things, which you'll probably have to do additional stuff to those five things.
After all of this headache congrats you got yourself the vineyard, why is this important since you can grow grapes yourself? well, to automate wine production of course. most people use it for energy consumption which is good paired with that one perk for wine usage, but I personally stuck with honey.
What's that? automation? yes you can automate stuff in this game, thankfully Breaking dead does come free with the game. However Automation is a WHOLE other headache that I'll spare you from, but I'll give you a brief rundown:
1.You first need to unlock Gunter, to do that you need to progress through Snake's story.
2. You invest into the zombie tech trees and build the necessary stuff for it and get yourself a new body via donkey (skull ratings are very important, it will determine how fast the zombie moves)
3. Faith is very important so don't neglect it otherwise you'll find yourself waiting for sundays (the purple icon I believe) to just get faith. In order to get more faith... you guessed it, it's another complicated procedure which involves writing.
4. When you finally get yourself your first zombie you'll see it's kind of bad so naturally you look into ways to make it faster, this is where my memory becomes foggy since I don't remember much but I sure remember the horrible time I had. Preferably you need gold quality injections which I believe fertilizers come into play once more.
My final two cents.
While there are some funny moments in game, the amount of grind you have to do is too much for "casual" playthrough, you'll just find yourself doing chores over and over again, you're better off doing the chores IRL than in this game.
If you really want to play this game, get it on sale. I made the mistake to get all DLCs at first... don't do that, it will confuse you even more, the game is already pretty confusing on certain aspects because tutorials don't FULLY explain the things they're trying to explain so you'll have to either find out on your own or surf the wiki.
I tried getting back into the game in april but I couldn't recall what I was trying to do at all... staring a new game was also out of the question because it just felt draining, knowing what awaited me.
