If I'm being honest, I found the idea of this game intriguing. I like fairly morbid things and after trying the Traveler's Rest game, I had really high hopes for this.
But I was almost immediately let down. Not just in comparison to Traveler's Rest, which tops this game in terms of design, graphics and story, but just in general!
It's set in a small all-white town, all the women characters are posed as "simple" or "seductive" (with most falling under the 'simple' category) with little in terms of character development or intrigue.
You're "allowed" to make certain choices but the main character will stay determined to go home to his wife and kids you've heard ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about and there's a lot of mechanics that you have to wander around trying to figure out because none of it is explained.
There are also quests and you're supposed to have a board with all the characters and your quests related to them but the notes are so vague and some of them don't appear at all. Which I'd be okay-ish with if this were in-progress but this is a finished game?
The building mechanics are also awkward. You can't really tell exactly how big things are going to be until you're definitely placing them down to build and then you can't pick them up and move them, you have to destroy them and get new materials to rebuild in a new (hopefully better) position. (The visuals also get so dark sometimes and it is genuinely difficult to see what's on screen!)
The church is very basic and repetitive. It repeats the same scene almost every time, even with different prayers and all the townspeople can say of the church is that they hate sinners who bring about things like magic and such, they hate the poor who live in the little all white town, they hate graveyard keepers like ourselves and witches.
There's not much in terms of actual building or interesting mechanics there, which is disappointing. I hate church but I'd still be interested in actual mechanics involving it!
Which brings us to the zombies. I was so excited about the prospect of alchemy in the game but when they introduce it, it's so clear that the biggest "purpose" of alchemy in the game is to create zombies, which the game literally presents as "ethical slaves."
I cannot emphasize how much I do not want to enslave people, "ethically" or not. At no point in my life have I ever asked myself, "Why don't they have games with ethical slavery? Someone should get on that."
At no point have I ever wanted to bring people back to life in my Breaking Bad-ass church backroom just so that I can enslave them to do infinite labor for me until they die again. What type of Confederate knockoff manifestos were the devs reading? 'Cause that's what its giving.
I want to mess around with magic, I want to grow and build some ♥♥♥♥, I want to serve some customers; I do not want to own slaves in some creepy all-white town with next-to-no women.
And don't get me started on the Roma people in the game. It's an all-white town except for the "traveling heathen" that is a Roma guy who camps in town, whose sister might be scheduled to be burnt as a witch or something.
Except of course, they use a slur for Roma and it's a complete caricature but surely that says nothing about the game designers. 🙄
The most frustrating aspect is that the game has potential. The skill tree is so well-designed, the fighting is an awesome aspect (actually exciting, very good addition!), the alchemy is just as complicated and vague as I wanted it to be, there's so much to do and yet the story again and again falls short!
So many of the mechanics are awkward as ♥♥♥♥ and unexplained (don't get me started on the fishing!) and so much of it is just monotonous as ♥♥♥♥. So no, I do not recommend it. It's a waste of money (and time).
