It's the kind of game where you're looking at gorgeous art and poking around and just getting that feeling of being a kid interacting with a pop-up book and lifting the flaps and finding secrets, and there's these cute mysteries, and there's all these threads and sometimes the motivations aren't really clear and you're not really sure exactly what's going on but it's a great time -- and then you deduce, largely by process of elimination, who the final killer must be...and then suddenly the entire design of the thing snaps into focus and the entire plan of the thing crystalizes. I laughed. I might have cried. The closest I can compare it to is Ghost Trick. It's that good. I played it over a long weekend, a page at a time in between some work, and I thoguht it was worth every penny. I hope they make so many more.
The Magister is a bit more simple of a game than it appears to be at first glance, but it's got a lot of charm. In practice it's fairly boardgamey -- the names may be different every run (which is actually a bit of a mistake if you ask me -- I end up just referring to all of them by their job and not paying atten to their names at all), but the characters and locations are always the same. A culprit is picked randomly from them and evidence is shuffled around -- it's like a game of Clue where you know the things you need to figure out in order to solve the murder. Each character generates quests -- after you've solved a couple of them, they're willing to give you further information that you can use to discover motives for the murder, clues to the killer's identity, and ways to poke holes in their alibis. Your investigation will always take the same basic path and require the same basic steps to solve and the differences between stories aren't any more complex than "Colonel Mustard with the rope in the conservatory" vs "Miss Scarlet with the knife in the kitchen," but the focus in higher difficulty levels becomes about efficiency. You're given a limited number of turns to solve the crime, and the challenge lies in beating your score, basically. Combat and character development is really wonderful and lets you go in a couple of different directions. There are two combat systems -- a more traditional, grid-based tactical thing and "tactical diplomacy" (aka talking combatants down), and they're both a lot of fun and represent two different angles on the same basic concept. Everything is card based, with combat starting with a large deck which whittles down as the combat goes on, and tactical diplomacy starting with an extremely small deck which increases in size each turn. It's casual, light, and charming -- it's going to be a fun one to revisit when I want to kill an hour but don't want to start anything big. Looking very forward to their next game!
I'm seeing a lot of reviews from early in the game which say it's unfinished and unpolished -- I played it after all of the DLC had been released, so I can't talk about what it was like at release, but this game took over my life for a while in a really good way. I like Stardew Valley fine as a whole, but I took to Graveyard Keeper a lot better, possibly because I was goth in high school. I'm less into farming, which is very much there in GK but a little bit less of a focus; GK is more about navigating crafting trees. It's very similar to Factorio in that regard, but it's a lot less...Factorio about it than Factorio is, if you know what I mean. I did love itvery much, but there is a line -- and it's different for everybody -- that most people hit with it where you're perhaps too stupid for it and you never pick it up again and it sits in your library quietly judging you and you just go on with your life, a little weight off of your mind. GK is plenty intricate and you'll need to make some diagrams, but it's more about organization and management than comprehension. GK is also lovely -- look at those screenshots! That's some beautiful art! -- and I found it a lovely world to hang out in. There's a ton of fun characters to befriend, everybody has these quest lines that are really satisfyingly journaled and laid out -- as a Capricorn, I do love a game that makes you create a routine for yourself and a bunch of to-do lists and lets you complete them at your own pace. There's a pile of stuff, and you can tackle it however you like. The wall I *did* hit was because that pile is a little TOO large with all of the DLC installed at once -- each has a new mechanic and storyline, and there's just so much of it. Breaking Dead contains zombies which act as automation and are a fairly essential QOL feature, but I'd advise holding off on the others until further in the base game -- if I'd paced it better, I would have been less overwhelmed. In short, I highly recommend it!
I was expecting glitter and fuzz and immersive environments full of living creatures. The game is missing all of the whimsey and depth of what the movie and show mean to people.
While I had wished to do more at the end of the original game, for the very affordable price it was more than worth the beautifully crafted content it provided, it was the perfect length without all the extra chaf other RPGs pile on to add hours to a game. I am more than happy to spend a measly 7 bucks flesh out the experience even more. You are not going to enjoy this game if you like to grind or don't like to read. So far, I have enjoyed the extra content this DLC is providing immensely.
