Now that I think about it, I remember thinking that Graveyard Keeper was an okay game that appeared to be trying as hard as it could to be bad. There were just a LOT of terrible decisions that didn't need to be that way or didn't seem to do anything or then needed to be balanced out by a different poor decision.
Alchemy is probably the worst, though. It's a cool system on paper: You break items down into powders, liquids, or essences, then combine them to get cool effects. Failures give goo, which can then be refined back into the aforementioned ingredient types. So if you need lightning powder but don't have an item that breaks down into that, but you DO know a combination that gives lightning goo, you can inefficiently launder existing ingredients into what you need.
Needless to say it's terrible.
To start with, it's a clunky system because you need a different crafting bench to extract each ingredient, and then there's two different alchemy benches for some reason. And these need to be finagled into the limited and awkwardly shaped space of your basement because reasons. And then you'll quickly fill up storage with the massive quantity of elements divided among three different ingredient shapes- no four, remember you need oozes too. And that's not including storage space for the base items you actually break down. And as I recall items themselves list their elements but not the ingredient type? Or maybe the other way around, so maybe you know butterfly wings give powder and essence but can't be turned into liquids, but you just have to remember they're Chaos element, as I recall. Ditto-ish with the actual recipes- they show up on one of the crafting benches under the recipes tab, but I seem to recall it not tracking them on the other bench or when you're experimenting or something, so you're kind of flying dark unless you run over to check. Needless to say, it absolutely doesn't track which combos you've tried or which goos they give on failing. Oh, and the goos they give are semi-random, there's two types it can give for some reason, so that laundering scheme I talked about is doubly inefficient on top of its normal inefficiency, assuming you remember (or ever find out) what a given failed combo provides.
So again, problems on problems and most of them sound like they'd be pretty easy to tweak to make playable, but for some reason they very deliberately went for this. Of course, none of this is the real issue anyway: The real issue is that there are only a handful of recipes in the game, so blind exploration through three ingredient forms and dozens of elements gives you garbage almost every time. The game realizes this and has a solution: It just hands or strongly hints at any recipe you actually need to have. So after all that STUFF, the whole system is basically nonfunctional anyway.
So yeah. Most of the game isn't nearly that bad, but a LOT of it suffers from this infuriating tendency to swerve hard to avoid being good.
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Topic: SALES Thread (Read 1477148 times)