Amazing harvestmoonlike full of content!
It took me well over 50 hours to finish the base game, and at no point did it feel artificially stretched. There was always something new, even near the very end. And I feel like I've learned a thing or two about time management and planning. There are no time limits or permadeath, but you can still choose to stress about being behind schedule which you arbitrarily set up for yourself.
OK, you probably know the drill. The core gameplay relies on you inheriting a broken down husk of a property, and for one reason or another, you have to fix everything up and turn it into a prosperous, economical, efficient and beautiful place. You will do all the work, good old blood, sweat and tears.
Only this time, the property is very strange! It's an old closed-down church with a small decaying graveyard and a decrepit morgue. This will be your main focus, but there is also farming, bee-keeping, alcohol making, necromancy, selling snacks at a witch burning, and even a little 15-floor dungeon.
The good is easy to sum up. The game was great fun for at least 45+ hours. I loved it, I never felt bored, never felt like I've seen everything there is until the very end. That's a real achievement already.
The variety of activities is really wide and if you rush, you will have a hard time to see everything at its full glory. The pixelart looks really great, you can just stop and watch the leaves and fields of wheat sway in the wind. And while the music is pretty good and fitting too, do try to turn it off and take a stroll through the forest. The ambience is so lovely.
If you don't mind the lack of goals at the end, I bet you could stretch the fun well over 100 hours. You might also be tempted to play it again, now that you think you have mastered it, avoiding all the rookie mistakes.
The bad only starts showing up very late into the game. It's a thousand tiny things that only start to be annoying if/when you start taking things too seriously. Which I do, and I was disappointed to see that's where I should take my leave, instead of leaving the final quest unresolved and play for many more hours like I originally planned.
Issues like: getting stuck on a single pixel, inconsistencies among crafting UIs, lack of certain shortcuts and QOL features, time not stopping when you shop or select recipes, limited inventory in combination with item spam, exponentially more focus demanding if you try doing more than one thing at a time, etc.
You get the idea. None of those things really matter at a slow relaxed pace, or early on when you just don't manage such a large area. Also, just to be clear, the game never puts you under mandatory time pressure. Nobody will scold you for making no money this game week, and even if you spend all your money on a diamond and delete it from your inventory, you can go pick wild apples or honey and bounce back.
The game is great at slow, steady and linear. Focus on one task at a time, because if you try doing multiple things at once in a speedy manner, you will probably find it very hard or impossible, and it won't be your fault, it will be a janky collision or UI weirndess you never noticed before rushing.
Overall the game was perfectly stable on my Windows 7 64bit PC, didn't crash, ran well except some areas slowing down a bit for unknown reasons. I recommend turning on V-Sync in the settings. Ignore the longer loading time, that's only during startup, there are no other loading screens, and saving takes about two seconds. Plays with hands on keyboard and mouse, you can re-define almost all hotkeys.
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