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[Mephansteras]

To be fair to coral island, the whole underwater stuff is a bit different. At least, I don't think any other game in the genre has you go around cleaning up trash from the ocean.

It's not a terribly compelling mechanic to me personally, but I can see how some people would like it.

I wouldn't call it 'redefining', but perhaps there is more to it than the stuff I've seen about it.

[ZebioLizard2]

I think gravekeeper has been decently improved on the grind front by eventual DLCs, for what it's worth? Was some automation additions or somethin' like that. Watching a bit of a playthrough didn't look that bad...

It is still very, very grindy. It's a game that if you are expecting to play it as a standard farmesque game or gravekeeper sim.. Well you'll be disappointed.

Though if you enjoy figuring out efficiency it really is the game for you.

[AlStar]

My main problem with Graveyard Keeper was that all of the questlines required you to get a 'certificate of nobility' (or something of the sort) which cost 12 gold pieces... in a game where everything else you're doing is measured in copper or maybe single pieces of silver.

Obvious ploy by the developers to extend the game length, which I didn't appreciate.

They did something similar where you'd hand a plot-related item to a character, and they'd tell you to come back in a week, just so that you could hand them the next plot-related item to them (which you already had the first time!)

Quoting my Steam review of the game - "I completed the game in 72 hours. I really enjoyed ~65 of those, and I put up with the rest to finish off the game."

[Folly]

With time running out to back Coral Island, I took one final look at their kickstarter page. From the FAQ section:

What sets Coral Island apart from other farm sim games?
We hope the following features offer players a unique and fresh farming experience!

- Southeast Asia inspired world-building
- Ethnically diverse cast of characters, hand-drawn in a Disney-inspired style
- Promoting environmental awareness through gameplay
- Diving to save coral and improve farm output quality
- Wholesome feel-good gameplay

My major objection here is that 4 out of these 5 points are stylistic options, and not particularly innovative ones, being passed off as gameplay. The one thing in there with actual gameplay impact is just walking around picking up trash, which is not an exciting or interesting mechanic.
Yeah, that's gonna be a hard pass from me.

It's nice to see that there is still interest in the farming sim genre though. Maybe something worthwhile will come and get funded eventually.

[Glloyd]

Yeah, the trailer just looks so bland and uninspired. One of the shots is functionally identical to a shot from Stardew's trailer, except in 3D. The combat also looks laughably bad. Bad enough that I'm surprised it's even in the trailer at all, or the game for that matter.

This is only vaguely related, but I'm surprised that games still do well on Kickstarter. It's wild to me that people still back games on there, let alone that this bland looking game from an unknown dev team picked up that much in funding.

[Jimmy]

I think gravekeeper has been decently improved on the grind front by eventual DLCs, for what it's worth? Was some automation additions or somethin' like that. Watching a bit of a playthrough didn't look that bad...

The grind in Graveyard Keeper is real. I finished the game, but the sense of accomplishment as payoff wasn't really worth the time invested.

Adding zombie creation in the DLC simply adds a new grind to the game to create said zombies. It gives you a new hamster wheel to run on, but doesn't do too much to disguise that wheel's nature. Plus, they nerfed the muffin recipe, which was hands down the best bulk food item before wine, making mid-game stamina management even more tedious.

[E. Albright]

If I may ask those who've played it, how grindy and/or unevenly finished is My Time in Portia? The negative reviews really point to those two things being the major downsides. It's on sale for 66% off this week - would I likely regret getting it, or if I wanted to give this style of life sim a try would I likely be happier if I waited for the forthcoming sequel?

[Akura]

It's been awhile since I've played it, but I wouldn't say it's too grindy. I haven't played Graveyard Keeper, but I did play Punch Club by the same developer which has the same philosophy of grind, and My Time at Portia is nowhere near that bad. Later in the game you do get a few things that cut down on the grind significantly. However, I would not quite put this in the same vein as Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon; the focus is far more on crafting stuff than farming.

As for content, I don't know. I know there was some end-game stuff that was missing, as well as a lot of voiced dialogue(and some drama regarding that), but I don't know what's been added since.


I've also been put off a bit by the marketing campaign for the sequel, My Time at Sandrock, where they're offering (mostly) cosmetic content for prices over $200 a piece even before the game is in Early Access.

[Aoi]

Like, beyond the usual Kickstarter stuff? Kind of curious, where can you find the premium stuff? A quick glance around doesn't turn up much, though it is kind of a pain to look for stuff on a phone.

[Akura]

Might have been just the Kickstarter stuff. It's been awhile and I stopped caring about it a while ago.

[Jimmy]

My Time at Portia is cute, with a progression that's fairly linear through the game and a strong tie to games like Stardew Valley if you were a miner rather than a farmer. Depending on your familiarity with the game's tech trees, it's possible to speed-run the game fairly simply, but expect to spend a lot of time in their mining zones. The grind for acquiring resources is the biggest time-sink in the game.

But then, that's what the game's core gameplay is. It's not a game about jumping across platforms to reach the end of the level. It's not a game about shooting the other team of five players. It's about digging ditches in the dirt, making presents for your neighbours, and upgrading your equipment to access the next zone. If that pushes your fun button, go for it. But expect to spend more than a third of your gameplay time watching your character repeatedly swing a pickaxe.

[Aoi]

But expect to spend more than a third of your gameplay time watching your character repeatedly swing a pickaxe.

To be fair, that does sound like a delightfully Dorfy pastime.

[Glloyd]

I burnt out in the mid-late game of Portia similar to how I burnt out in Graveyard Keeper. Portia's less grundy, but for both games by the time you start hitting the late game, everything just feels so repetitive and grindy. Portia also had a very uninteresting cast of characters, and an art style that I wasn't too fond of. The enemy designs were particularly ugly, and felt incongruous with everything else in the game, almost as if they were bought from an asset store or something. The combat was also garbage. Not that Stardew's is great, it's serviceable, but my bar is higher for 3D games when it comes to that. That said, I did have fun with the first 10-15 hours of it. You do a lot of mining, but I didn't mind just zoning out and listening to music while doing it. It was definitely more relaxing than the grind in graveyard keeper.

I've yet to find something in this genre that really grabs me like Stardew does. I've put well over 100 hours into it and played through it twice, once alone and once with friends, and I can always come back to it. I'm not a fan of grind, and it never really felt like Stardew had any grind, but so many of its competitors make that a focus as a way of artificially inflating the length of the game.

[Scripten]

The main thing with Stardew's grind is that, for the first three or so game years, you're technically grinding, but there's never quite enough time to do everything in one day. The constraints make you plan out a strategy for tackling your own self-made goals and effectively smooth out the grind. Plus the applicability of the weather to different tasks and various special events help vary tasks for optimization.

It's Solid Game Design^tm.

[Mephansteras]

It also helps that, in a very real sense, the grind literally doesn't matter.

You can spend days being completely useless and it doesn't actually hurt you that much. You don't need massive amounts of money. You don't need to complete the Community Center quickly. You don't have to get married. You don't have to level up all your skills.

It has all these great mechanisms to help you deal with the grind or make things more efficient if that's what'll make you happy as a player. But it also doesn't really penalize you if you don't.