I am utterly obsessed with what this game promises to be. I love necromancy, I like the idea of taking immoral shortcuts to make a living, I love the idea of TENDING A GRAVEYARD. But you don't really do that. You grow carrots, chop trees, mine stones, dig sand, gather clay, process all these materials into planks and glass and nails and wedges and write books and wait for Sunday so you can do a prayer service so you can use the faith to research items so you can unlock more ways to refine your stone or make wine, etc. etc. Anything and everything to avoid the titular graveyard. The entire mechanic is: there are good corpses and bad corpses. The bad corpses make your graveyard look like crap so it will earn less money from church-goers. To rectify this there are various surgeries you can do on the corpses that will either give you good resources, improve the body, or make the body worse. (Dumping it in a river like in the trailer only happens once. After that it's much more beneficial to cremate bad bodies legally.) Decorate bodies with tombstones of various materials you've been processing, and boom done, you did it. Meanwhile every quest will ask you to grow grapes to make wine or to make oil to mix with ash to make black paint to make ink to combine with paper that you made and a feather that you bought all to make 10 flyers and I just *don't care* And all the dead of night corpse defiling has zero consequence so it loses all of its punch very quickly. You end up making a broad daylight logging camp of zombies and no one bats an eye. No one reacts to anything actually. They just stand there waiting for you to do their quest. So the dead are just another boring resource And the map is way too big. So much time spent walking, even with the band-aid teleport stone you can buy very early game. Not that you'll know how good it is because nothing has tooltips. So good luck figuring out how expensive something is going to be before you unlock it. (use the wiki)
You can have a lot of fun with the nemesis system, as I did for 70 hours. But if you want to enjoy a crafted narrative from start to finish, your time will not be respected. The final act of the game is both unfair and filler, with repeated content from the previous parts of the game. You will have to spend 10 hours grinding to find good orcs, give them bodyguards, and set them all up in a nice little fort to defend. None of this will matter if you get one-shot by a random ranged orc who has an ability that negates your last-chance revival. Now that you have died, all the defenses that you've made magically stop working, and you lose the fort no matter what. You cannot retry. You are then tasked with retaking it, something you have done 6 or 7 times already in the main story, just so you can get back to doing more repeated content. An endless mode is one thing, but this is required to get the ending. And there are no side-quest distractions to do whatsoever, as they stopped appearing ages ago, not that half of them were any fun. AND all these repeated seiges don't even play into the nemesis system because all the orcs that show up to attack are total strangers. And upon showing up, they may very well take the place of orcs you've actually spent time with, because there's only so much room in a region for the game to store them. And if you actually LIKE that part of the game enough to want to do it forever, don't buy the game on GOG, because the publisher only allows you to use their online mode when they can leech the server space from other platforms. There's also no achievements on this version. And all of that will be fine for most people because the sandbox nemesis system is the star of the show anyway. And it's not that good. Orcs will remember you if you die, but what that amounts to isn't all that impressive. They will say one line of taunting when they see you next, and there's a lot they CAN say, but it's shallow. They gain no tactics, just buffs and lv.
always something to do
