Graveyard Keeper Update

 I kind of gave up on Graveyard Keeper not too long after I wrote that review. The story was fun, BUT...

There are WAY too many ingredients for potions and things and the chain to make some of the stuff you need is VERY long without clear instructions or hints on how to get there. You have to mix two or three things together to get a new ingredient that you then have to mix with two or three other things to get a new different ingredient which you then mix with more, and keep repeating until you finally manage to figure out how to make the stuff you really wanted in the first place. Oh and did I mention that all of these mixing and grinding and whatever steps can take place at any one of six different stations? Yeah, it got way more complicated than I wanted to deal with.

The reason you want these things is to eventually make zombies for yourself so you can automate all the fiddly little things like wood chopping, stone mining, grape growing, etc. I managed to get two or three zombies but then ran out of the bonus potions I'd found. See the paragraph above for why I gave up on trying to make more. The potions to make the zombies do what I wanted just took way to long to figure out and were too hard to make.

Did I mention that all of this potion making is trial and error until you accidentally stumble on a set of ingredients that make what you want? It's not always the same ones, either. Multiple ingredients can end up making the same thing. What they make also depends on if you grind them, smash them, blend them, cook them, or decompose them.

Another pet peeve were some of the quests. Why hand a player a quest right at the beginning of the game that they have no hope of finishing until they are more than halfway through your long, involved story? It's frustrating to me.

So, overall it was a fun game, but unless you're willing to spend a lot of time fiddling in the alchemy lab trying to figure things out, it drags horribly. And if you're like me and like to see progress by checking off quests, even if they're dumb fetch quests, this game will only make you frustrated. Half of the quests they hand you near the start aren't even possible until you've unlocked most of the items in the game which doesn't happen for a looooooong time.

I'm dropping my rating to 5/10.

Donut County

 Rating: 9/10 😸😸😸😸😸😸😸😸😸

Ages: probably 8+ mostly for story content

Donut County is a weird game. It's about a trash panda king and his empire of raccoons. And donut holes that eat things. And phone apps. And a whole town of mostly talking animals and possibly potato (?) brothers. It's a strange surrealistic game that is also a load of fun. We laughed so hard playing this.

Most of the game is animation of the townspeople talking to each other while they sit 999 meters below where their town used to be because DK, the raccoon who owns the donut shop, is using a new delivery app to deliver donuts to people, only they don't get donuts. They get donut HOLES that are actually holes that eat everything and get bigger as they devour rocks, chairs, tables, pool floaties, chickens, and anything else in the area.

This is a short game taking only an hour or two to play through, but I only paid a few dollars for it. It was well worth it. The mechanics were a little touchy, especially getting the hole to slow down and go where you wanted it to go, but that was a minor quibble with an otherwise very fun game.

It's quirky and weird and highly entertaining.