What Did We Play Yesterday?

Don't mind me just putting sombreros on my cows.

The desert area is fun because the quests let you recreate oasis, lakes, and greenery, which is the whole dang point of this here game. I got stuck in a drainage canal and ended up falling out of the level, so there was a bit more jankiness here wrt the map design, but it was a good time and you can befriend fennics.

One big advantage of this game is you can set up camp and build stuff anywhere there's level ground, which is something I really should have been doing from the beginning, so I set up a mini camp at the entrance of the desert to grow area crops and I'll set up a goat pen out there as well. You can actually create WAY more resources than you'll ever actually need from the billions of seeds you loot and the abundance of machines you can create, so--for example--having 1 or 2 bee hives in an area where you can recruit pigs is more convenient than returning to the farm, even if you can fast-travel. At best, any given crop is used to befriend a handful of animals and maaaaybe purchase an upgrade or craft an item, and after that there's not much practical use unless you're angling for certain achievements.

What I'm saying is you can declutter your farm with impunity. It will be fine.

I was warned the storyline for this game is dumb and I won't lie, the dialogue is tedious and boring as shit, so I tend to skip through all that and consult my quest ledger to figure out the specifics of what I need to do to advance the game. I have a lot of spare quest items lying around because the game provides more than you need, presumably so you don't have to hoover up every scrap of trash to complete your objective since quest items are usually hidden in piles of junk. So I've got a bunch of quest items I probably don't need but this game is so janky I don't want to trash anything just in case I need it later and end up breaking the game. I haven't actually tried to trash quest items but I'm assuming it's possible, considering everything else. IMO the best way to handle this sort of thing is to have quest items be "collected" in a separate inventory that cannot be manipulated, so they don't clutter up the main inventory and can't be accidentally removed.

We continue. As you can see, my farm was a hot mess. I tidied up by removing all the extra animal pens. This puts the assigned animals in limbo. After you place the pen elsewhere, you have to befriend all the animals again. Realistically, you only need one pen of each type at your farm, and it's best to construct extra pens at convenient waypoints.

I forgot you can plant fruit trees just about everywhere, so I've been scattering them about. I spent some time going around in circles for a few quests I couldn't remember how to handle but I think I've got it now.

I decided to fire No Place Like Home up and see where we're at. It took me a few minutes to reorient because my farm is absolute chaos, this game is truly inventory management hell. I scampered about, cleaning, befriending animals, and experiencing the jank. IIRC I stopped playing before because I got tired of cleaning, but right now, cleaning is the point, so it's working out for me.

This game has a known save issue bug that I stumbled across. The problem is the game doesn't correctly overwrite the manual save slot. Fortunately, the game keeps multiple autosaves and you can convert one of those.

Users/User/AppData/LocalLow/Awaken Realms/NPLH

Find the autosave backup (e.g. autosaveslot1.nplhsavebackup363) that reflects your most recent save and rename it to one of your main slot saves (e.g. slot_1.nplhsave).

I have a lot going on right now, so I decided to chill with a cleaning game. This cleaning game looks nice. Hmmm. This vacuum mechanic seems awfully familiar. As well as this music. And the way the trash looks...

Surprise! This was made by the No Place Like Home devs. They basically took the most satisfying parts of that game, which is the cleaning loop, and made a game that focuses entirely on that. Personally, they are different enough for me. Fresh Start Cleaning Simulator focuses on cleaning the environment and growing plants and being a generally chill experience, and in NPLH you're running around fighting spider robots and dealing with whatever the heck is going on with the farm mechanics and the jank is on full display.

So I ran to the blacksmith and offloaded a bunch of iron bars and coal, and scuttled back to buy a building permit. The bishop agreed to expand the church, but then that little shit had the audacity to tell me I had to buy YET ANOTHER permit thing before I could actually preach at the church, effectively cutting off a significant source of revenue until I do. It's 3 silver so it's not a huge deal, but I obviously don't have it and... c'mon man, lol. I feel so nickel and dimed by this damn game. And I didn't even get a bigger cemetery! Ugh.

But I'd forgotten I get a little over a silver for burying corpses, so as long as I stay on top of the gravedigger business I'll get there before sermon day rolls around.

Yesterday I was rapidly losing my enthusiasm for Graveyard Keeper because I felt like I had to do a dozen uninteresting chores to accomplish any given thing. But I was close to fulfilling the Bishop's quest line to expand the church, so I dutifully filleted some fish for him and reported back. He asks you to upgrade the church, upgrade the graveyard, and bring him fish, and I've done all 3 now. Time for a reward.

So he's like, congrats it's time to expand the church... as soon as you get a building permit, which costs 20.5 silver. I've got less than half that on hand, and still haven't found a decent way to make money beyond weekly sermons.

Selling is complicated because most of the merchants will only accept a few items. I took some of my produce to the farmer to sell, and was offered 9 bronze each... and that's when I bounced for the night, lol. Earning the scratch isn't as simple as selling 140 carrots either, because the way the in-game economy works if you flood the market the value of that item drops. So IDK. If I was already enjoying myself, I'd just do other stuff until I naturally acquired funds.

As I type this, I realize I could try mining up a bunch of different types of building materials and selling them to the blacksmith. I think he might only accept coal, iron ore, and maybe graphite, but that might be enough to scrape up what I need.

While I was trying to figure out my options, I learned that the zombies used to automate a lot of the tedious stuff are included in the Breaking Dead DLC, and the consensus is it's a must-have. It's included in the Steam version, but it's an extra purchase on consoles. :/ The developers are just making... all kinds of choices here, lmao.

And in case you were wondering, the fishing mechanic is a lot like Stardew Valley, except when you cast you can see the percentage catch chance and aim for a certain area. The mini-game itself feels less satisfying but works about the same.

Finally made the circular saw, which is needed to make beams. Doing so allowed me to break down all the rubble piles in the basement, so now they are all connected to the morgue. This reduces travel time somewhat. I also got around to completely repairing the cabin in the woods. This is an area where you can carve up slabs of marble, stone, and ore (which can only be carried one at a time) into much more manageable pieces that can be carried in inventory. There's a coal vein nearby as well.

I finally upgraded my church but just baaarely missed the bishop's visit, so I gotta wait a week, but that's fine. I'm probably going to start working on glass next, since I read you can study glass flasks for a good source of blue points. I am REALLY ready to upgrade my sermons, but it's a somewhat convoluted crafting process where I have to make paper, create notes, use "stories" which are basically like a writing creative essence, bind those into chapters, THEN make a new sermon book. The bishop has sermons for sale but I couldn't figure out how to buy them so IDK. I also have to figure out fishing, there's ZERO explanation of the mechanics but I've got a ton of maggots which I'm sure I can use as bait.

Graveyard Keeper has been on my list forever, but I never got around to it until the game was made free to advertise the upcoming sequel. I assumed it was Stardew Valley with Dead People, but it's really only superficially similar in terms of the overall game loop. This game is more crafting-focused, with a surprising amount of detail regarding corpse preparations, embalming, etc. This is a portal fantasy, sort of, and darkness is afoot, as there are witches being burned at the stake and the game allows selling cadaver flesh as meat or making candles out of body fat. There is farming, but it's simplified (you don't have to water crops and they don't wither as far as I can tell) and it's mostly intended to create ingredients for the wide-ranging crafting system.

Early game is a little stressful, as you're constantly running out of energy. New corpses arrive on a regular basis and it can be a struggle to inter them timely between the other chores, and if you don't, the body quality decays, which impacts your cemetery rating. Once you settle into the game, you have to trade carrots to get body deliveries, which helps a lot and lets the player control the pacing, and you can also grow and cook carrots for an easy energy boost so you don't have to constantly forage for berries and mushrooms. It also took me a while to finally generate blue points for upgrades, so I was still in limbo for a while needing to progress but being unable to do so until I unlocked the church and the ability to give sermons, and in turn, study items for blue points.

There is A LOT of walking around, and very often, walking to place, realizing you need certain items to repair a bridge or whatever, and having to walk all the way back. I found myself needing to consult a wiki a lot, because a lot of aspects of the game aren't explained or easily discoverable. There is a lot of crafting, and a lot of ingredient creation or foraging are required. Some areas are deliberately tedious, like the swamp, which is difficult to traverse, and if you get to the end and don't have the equipment to build a bridge you have to walk aaaaall the way back.

That being said, I've been sucked into this game over the past few days. I like upgrading and maintaining the cemetery, and I kinda like how sprawling the main area is. The forest and surrounding areas FEEL big, remote, and unexplored. A significant gameplay strategy is finding ways to make ingredient gathering more convenient, so you can cut logs or stone slabs and carry them back to your house, but you can only carry one log or slab at at time. Hopefully there's some kind of cart later.

The amount of work required for crafting ingredients, considering how much stuff needs to be crafting, can be pretty time-consuming. I've reached a point now where I just carry around a big stack of nails, planks, hinges, etc., and I still manage to find myself in situations where I don't have what I need. The sequel appears to emphasize automation which, at least at this stage in the original game, would help. The only automation I've found so far is the furnace, which I can use to create iron bars from ore.

I'm definitely enjoying this one for what it is, there is always something to do and I really like the cemetery maintenance aspect, but I'm already at the point where the more advanced crafting is getting a bit tedious. I find myself taking notes to keep up with what ingredients are needed for what project and help remember where things are on the map, which just emphasizes the lack of useful in-game information. But I think this will definitely be a one-and-done for me, and not a game I revisit. The game is a bit too stingy in terms of time management, and while it definitely fits the pseudo-medieval vibe, the devs have made very intentional choices to create player inconvenience and those limitations become more annoying as time goes on.