Graveyard Keeper – the wrong way

I absolutely loved this game, and I got sucked into it immediately as I sat down with it. I want to share some of it with you, hopefully without too much spoilers. The things I truly loved was the things I had no idea were in the game. That said, I didn’t know what I was to expect, as I hadn’t read much about the game, or seen much of it. I may have seen a few minutes of a stream here or there, but nothing extensive.

I sat down about a week ago, and got completely enveloped in the game for the whole week, until I finished it. There are obvious similarities to Stardew Valley, including it’s addictive “just one more day”-vibe, but Graveyard Keeper offered something different. I think the morbidity of being thrown back to something of a medieval time, to become a Graveyard Keeper (and not necessarily a good one) appealed to me. Combined this with the similarities to Stardew Valley you get a stark contrast. I soon noticed that a lot of the things I had wished for with Stardew Valley was actually in this game. Some automation, some neat ways of making deliveries, planting more than one square at the time, and not relying only on one way of completing quests.

The quests in this game offer different solutions, which was something I only discovered by accident. You could often complete it with money if that was your preferred mode of playing, and thus you can keep focus on building your kitchen garden along side your graveyard keeping, rather than going dungeoneering.

However, for adding somethings which made the game easier, they didn’t necessarily go all the way with it. Some of them were spotty, like crafting sometimes you can queue several things of the same, sometimes you can’t and when you can’t it wouldn’t remember the settings you last used when it came to the quality of the production. This would slow a lot of work down, while also forcing you to tediously click. For me this ended up being one reason I didn’t want to write books (yes you can write books!) until the very end.

One of the first characters we meet is the Donkey, who also happens to be one of my favorites, probably because he was a comrade. I had prepared a bundle of carrots for him and was very excited to give it to him, on that fateful day (you’ll understand when you play it). I wanted to share my crop with him, because he was helping me run my business. In regards to the other characters, I mostly disliked them all. And it’s possible that that’s the point, since this is such a different world from where we come from.

I have some minor gripes with the game, but I don’t know how much of it was about me rather than the game or if the game actually didn’t tell me properly. I ended up getting locked out of continuing one of the quest lines because I thought I was waiting for a different solution than I was. Without saying what I was struggling with I will say this: I had already triggered an event which apparently wouldn’t happen again, so I could continue, but I thought I needed to find it how to get through that same thing being triggered again. I was wrong. This did lead me to just very slowly play the game, and I probably didn’t progress the story further from this point until I had a good 40hrs in the game, and I was loving how “slow paced” it was.

I appreciated that the tech tree had hidden items which wouldn’t reveal until certain stages of the game, it makes more sense in a lot of ways, because you’re in a place and world you didn’t really know anything about.

My mind has a tendency to skip things, and which will result in me not reading properly during tutorials. I was burying corpses willy-nilly, and yes I saw red and white skulls, knowing one was minus (-) points. I just didn’t quite figure out how to make them better until I actually unlocked some late game technology. But when I did I ended up in a full new focus and zen-ly tended to my graveyard.

I ended up playing the game my way, which is tempting to call the wrong way, but I had a lot of fun. I hadn’t only screwed with one quest line, but I didn’t realize this until the very end.

Compared to Stardew Valley, I would like to say that I didn’t feel as stressed out by the week, and time moving the same way. As in Stardew your always thinking about the season, the crop, and such things. However, I was having some trouble realizing some stuff about the days and how that worked. Eventually I let go though, and just didn’t try to complete each thing every week, but let myself get lost in something I enjoyed doing. One week it may be fixing the graveyard, one week it may be fishing, and another I may just start selling stuff that needs to be sold. This is definitely how I’d recommend people play the game, don’t rush too much to do the story, but catch it when you can and prepare if you want to.

When I slowed down my pace, and just focused on what I wanted to do and complete for my own sake, the game became very enjoyable in a different way. I loved the play-through in it’s entirety, but I had one session where I started to hate the game, and that made me sad, but again that was a me thing, not a game thing. And I did get over it fairly soon.

I would highly recommend this game to anyone who’s ever enjoyed Stardew Valley, but also if you’ve never played Stardew Valley, because this is definitely a game of its own. And I’m looking forward to playing a few DLCs in the future!


If you’d like to pick up this game, and support me, you can do so through Humble Bundle via this link.

Long Time No See

This blog is receiving a revival as it’s remained unused after I moved hosts last year (and a half year before that).

This blog is receiving a revival as it’s remained unused after I moved hosts last year (and a half year before that).

The game related updates have mainly been happening on my Patreon, because they became woven in with some rewards. Now I will however publish them here instead, and add links to the Patreon (or additionally), maybe share drafts first, or at least let people know what’s coming

Basically this year I’ve decided to myself, and together with some others, that I’ll be focusing on writing. This will come in a few different ways, one is going to be on here. The goal is to continue my journey of games, another year of experiences as I continue finishing off some steam games, while still allowing myself to buy the occasional new game.

That said, we are still streaming, and some games will be streamed as well! And yes, I said we, because it’s still me and Loa(Games) that share a space together on Twitch where we are our silly selves most of the time, and enjoy playing off each other.

What happened to kinkymal?

Well, I got the chance to change my name to maloki on Twitch, so I took that opportunity, even if me and Loa are still streaming together on that channel. However, this blog will still be kinkymal, as well as the YouTube which is also currently inactive.

There’s some ideas about what Loa will be contributing, but he has asked me to not share it until he’s gotten a little bit further with the process, but I got to say that I’m excited about it.

How often can we expect reviews?

Well, there wont be any reviews more often than we actually finish the games, but the goal right now will be to be able to publish something at least bi-weekly on this blog. And if I complete games in between I’m likely to space out the reviews, or take extra time with them. Right now I have 2 games that I’ve completed in 2019, which are Subnautica and >observer_ both of which I am aiming to write a review of.

If you are looking to support my gaming addiction, and the writing of these reviews I would like to direct you to my $5 Patreon sponsor tier. I have recently changed the tiers on there to be sponsorships to better represent how I may not be able to give anything back until I’m healthier. However, the suggestions I’ve made in this post would indicate that maybe I’m doing better, I just hope it sticks.

And I think that’s it for today. If you got any questions, feel free to reach out to me on social media and we can have a chat. Take care, and thank you for sticking with me.


Played in March, April & May

Woah. I’ve not been updating this place have I. Sorry about that!
But, any of you who follow me elsewhere know why. Time to write a catch-up post!!

This post will not define exactly when games were completed, but just summarize all the games which I’ve played during the period, even the ones that did not get streamed, or could not be completed for other reasons.

Played but not finished:

Starcraft 2, We are merely at the beginning of the first campaign on stream, and I am unsure why we didn’t go back to playing more. I think it’s because we began playing Fable and got really stuck in it. Definitely want to get back to this, and I know you’ll all appreciate me playing it.

Don’t Starve Togetheranother game I play together with Loa. This unfortunately isn’t really a game you “finish”, but I love the Klei aesthetics, and the quirkiness of the game. You will probably see us play this on stream occasionally.

Faeria, a game which also can’t really get completed. It’s a “PC Card Battler”, which takes a pretty neat twist on the regular card games. If you want to add me, or try it out because you heard about it from me, add “maloki” as friend and referral.

Finished:

Fable – The lost chapters, we spent a lot of time on stream playing this game, but towards the end it was time to move on, and stream some other games, so I finished it off stream. I enjoyed the experience, and it was quite different, with a horrible UI! So, I doubt I’d go back for another play through of it.

Ducktales – Remastered, We played through this game almost in its entirety during my birthday stream. But at the last boss fight there was a bug which resulted in us not finishing the game. I have tried to find solutions for it, but none of them worked. From what I could garner the issue is related to which gfx you have.

Kith – Tales from the Fractured PlateusIssue 1, is a really cute little indie, casual adventure game. And it’s free to play! I found the game because it was shared by the developer on Mastodon actually. This game was also played during my birthday stream.

Bound by Flame, This game I’ve been playing myself for the past few few months. A little here, and a little there. It  is a single player action RPG. I’ve been using my steam controller, but there is a bug in the game where it wont recognize the controller if you have your keyboard connected on startup, which means it’s a bit fiddly every time you want to play the game. All in all? It’s fun and engaging story, they make a lot of fun of each other, and curse a lot. The combat system did have quite a learning curve, but I played through on casual so it did not matter too much for me until the end of the game, when it may have mattered a bit too much.
When I completed my Casual play through I immediately wanted to have another go, not so much for the achievements, as the fact that I could have taken quite different choices along the way and I am curious to see what that part of the game looks like. This time is being played on normal.

Borderlands, Shooter looter, is this what they are called? Me and Loa had been playing it on and off for the past year. And we just completed the Clap Trap DLC as well. I quite enjoyed the entire game, and the silly humour in it. Looking forward to playing Borderlands 2 with Loa. Probably on a “co-op Thursday”.

 

So, looks like we completed 5 games, not bad, not bad. Speaking of games, if you are curious about my streaming you can check it out on twitch.tv/kinkymal

 

10th of April: Birthday Stream!

Good news everyone!
On the 10th of April I’m planning a birthday stream.
Until then I want to reach 100 followers on my Twitch account. A slow steady growth.

I do variety game streaming (and my patrons help me choose game each month). Currently I’m playing Fable, StarCraft 2 and Lone Survivor, previously I’ve played Edna & Harvey: The Breakout, Day of the Tentacle, and Scribblenauts.

So mark it down in your calendar, and give me a follow on Twitch!

( I wrote this about two weeks ago, but it got lost in “draft”, sorry!)

Mastodon (New Twitter?!) 101

It is now prime time “to join a kinder, nicer, decentralized open source version of Twitter.”

What is Mastodon? 


Mastodon is a free, open-source social network, and it’s a decentralized alternative to commercial platforms. Have you ever wished for a social network without ads everywhere? Yeah! Let’s sign up!!

Oh no! Sign-ups are closed!!

What do we do now? Well, if you click on the picture or follow this link you it takes you to a lost of instances which talk to each other.

What do you mean talk to each other? Well, have you ever used hotmail, or gmail?
It’s the same thing! Just in a micro-blogging setting. Even the “micro” is relative. mastodon.social has in particular offers 500 characters, others are unlimited.

Mastodon usernames work kind of like email addresses. There are several hosts (“instances”) available, so it’s completely up to you which you want to be known on!
To explain further, just like how, say, microsoft@outlook.com can send emails to google@gmail.com, so can users send each other messages, and follow each other across different instances!

In my case I’m maloki@mastodon.social.

What’s an instance?  Server instances can go under several names such as, server, domain, node, or instance. It is just another server place offering a home for mastodons to graze on.

So, mastodon.social isn’t the only option?
No! Let me introduce you to a few options:

witches.town
“Witches Town is made to provide a nice place on Mastodon for queer, feminists, anarchists and stuff. We are mostly french people but you are welcome even if you speak another language.”

memetastic.space
It is a social media experiment where the main aim is to share and discuss dank memes and awful jokes. We aim to bring together the meme communities of Twitter and beyond to form one website filled with the latest trends and jokes.

social.targaryen.house
One among the several mastodon instances in the fediverse. It aims to be an alternative choice, and it’ll federate with other instances. Fire and Blood!

social.tchncs.de
This might be one of the best pieces of software for microblogging you can get right now. We here at tchncs.de are proud to be one of the first instances of Mastodon! Quick updates ensured. Mastodon is compatible and connected to the GNUsocial network.

social.bytesexual.net
A Mastodon instance run by the merry men of bytesexual.net. All fun and no SLA since 2012. Managed by @q3k, follow for service updates.

masto.themimitoof.fr
Français: Bienvenue sur l’instance Mastodon appartenant à themimitoof.fr. L’objectif est de faire durer et faire vivre cette instance le plus longtemps possible. L’instance est régulièrement mise à jour pour bénéficier des récents correctifs et améliorations. Rejoignez-nous !
English: Welcome on Mastodon instance owned by themimitoof.fr . The goal is to make this instance to live as long as possible. The instance is updated to get recent patches and improvements. Join us!

fern.surgeplay.com
A Minecraft-focused Mastodon instance run by SurgePlay. You’re free to talk about anything else, as long as it’s not overly offensive or obnoxious. Please put a warning on any content that others may not want to see. TL;DR: Have fun and don’t be a jerk!

pouet.it
Instance anarchostalinienne et allié·e·s membre de la fédération OStatus (GNU social, Mastodon). Tout enfant abandonné sera détruit.

Full list of instances is available here.

(( If you want to be featured on this list (I’ll try to update it when people provide me info) please send me the url and a blurb to this account: @maloki@mastodon.social ))

But if I move I use all my Twitter people?
Yes, but there’s a help. You can try out this rudimentary bridge to help you connect with your friends from Twitter.
Or you can choose to not to connect, and get a fresh start.
Also, check out hashtags like #introduction and #introductions and #welcome on your server, to see what you find, and why not introduce yourself while you’re at it?

I’ve personally posted a few good-to-know posts under #welcome

So what is this thing anyways?
As introduced at the top of the post, decentralized social network. This particular one is using Mastodon, which is “an alternative implementation of the GNU social project. Based on ActivityStreams, Webfinger, PubsubHubbub and Salmon.

Focus of the project on a clean REST API and a good user interface. Ruby on Rails is used for the back-end, while React.js and Redux are used for the dynamic front-end. A static front-end for public resources (profiles and statuses) is also provided.” (github)

So, now what? 

Now we find a home that fits us, introduce our friends to it!
Also we try to talk to bigger communities which we’d want to be able to connect to people on. And ask them to implement this open-source alternative to let their users connect to the rest of the world. This is the way forward.
You want to “email” to other servers, right?

Good links: 
On the github page there’s also a FAQ.
Someone also wrote this useful guide.
List of mastodon instances
Bridge for Twitter-Mastodon.social (as I’m writing it’s being updated to function for all instances)
Great introduction to some functionalities which I have not brought up here.

Android Apps:

Tusky
TootyFruity

iOS Apps:

Amaroq

More apps can be found here


You can help support me via Patreon, as I may end up spending way too much time and spoons on Mastodon in the near future. <3

Played in February

I made a resolution, and I have begun working on it.

For January I never really updated which games I got through, so I will just bundle them into this post.

We began by completing Day of the Tentacle – Remastered, a puzzle game. This was challenging for me, mostly because I haven’t been playing puzzle games for years, or barely at all. It was time to get into a new genre.

In the end of January I launched my Patreon, and at the $5+/month tiers you would get to help me choose what to play, a few different games were voted on, and we ended up with Edna & Harvey – the breakout, Lone Survivor, and Scribblenauts. And we actually played them all during February.

First, we played Scribblenauts, as a bit of comic relief. After the inauguration we all needed a break and something to laugh about. I wish the story was more prevalent throughout the game, but unfortunately it was mostly just in the beginning and while returning to the sister of Maximilian you don’t really get reminded of the story much. So, since I had already begun the game in an early stream (last spring), we all kinda missed that part of the story. The game was finished, at least the normal story bit, and there is still a lot of achievements to get, which I may return to in times of need.

Second, we began playing Edna & Harvey: the breakout. Which is another puzzle game. While playing through this one I did feel like I got more understanding of how puzzle games are laid out, and I could get through them a bit easier. Or Edna & Harvey is just easier towards the end, I did kinda feel like the puzzles towards the end of the game were a bit too simple and short, when they weren’t incredibly stupid and kinda incomplete. (Speaking of incomplete, if you play through the game in English you will encounter a bug at a semi-late point in the game, which can be fixed with this bug fix)

Last, we came to Lone Survivor, which is a beautiful, psychological, horror (?) game. we haven’t completed it yet, and one play session my boyfriend (LoaGames on Twitter) played instead of me. Unfortunately because I am not at full capacity yet, I will have days when I’m incredibly uncomfortable in my own skin and those are not good days to play scary games on.

All in all, we’ve had a good month and I’ve enjoyed playing through a few different games.

On the side, off stream, I’ve also been testing a Sole Survivor challenge for RimWorld, which is something I am considering making a stream-series off, maybe on “off days” when my energies are low. Just to keep consistent with streaming. We’ll see.

Anyways, 2 months almost done, and we’ve gotten through 3-4 games. It’s a good start. Going to be interesting to see how long the journey is going to be.
March is almost upon us, and it is time to vote for where we’re going next. I have a straw poll up which I will take results from tonight, and add to the final vote for my Patrons.

Year of Experiences: A Resolution

During the fall I found myself in a situation where I was gaming a lot, but not really experiencing a lot. I would be playing games which were more leaning towards sandbox games, and having no real end, unless you made yourself one. Examples of this is Guild Wars 2, RimWorld, and Sims 3. Don’t get me wrong, I love all these games, but I felt stuck, and like I wasn’t getting anywhere.

So, I began a new journey. Slowly, and as a process, I would ween off the sandbox games and venture into entirely new experiences. I played through Seasons After Fall, which is a magical game. I even ended up finishing all the achievements in my first run. I played Drop Alive, after it was mentioned in new releases on the Co-optional Podcast, a short platformer game. And I spent a good while playing the Banner Saga, after a recommendation from djWHEAT.

As I was getting closer to the new year, I wanted to expand on this a little bit. I am not only an avid gamer, but I also read a lot (2015, 44 books; 2016, 33 books). Loving games and books, I end up buying way too much especially if it’s on sale. Or if it’s in the local thrift shop, which also happens to be across the street (come home with a stack for books, 5-6, and only having spent $2.50 was a great deal I just couldn’t resist, over and over). One day I came home with a book it turned out I already owned. It was time to stop.

Having piled up some games, and books, it is time to actually experience them. So my resolution for 2017 is to play through as many games as I can, do achievements as I feel I want to/have energy for, and not spend any more money on games. I already own a steam controller, and I have a library of 176 games (33 are in my live-in boyfriends library). I am completely set for this year!

They say that the best resolutions are when you have some kind of accountability, in my case it will be the following tweets,

which were also brought up during the Twitch Weekly broadcast yesterday.

But to expand on this, I will be streaming my journey and update the blog on a monthly basis with which games I’ve been playing through. Do you want to join me?
and if you are interested in the progress with reading books, you can follow my other blog.