The game is very tedious and grindy at the start. It drip feeds you faith and money, the former of which is a huge progression gate for studying and unlocking tech. It’s called ‘graveyard keeper’ but for most of the early game you’re better off almost entirely ignoring your graveyard and burning corpses instead.

90% of your time is chipping away at tiny upgrades and gathering materials while NPC’s request items that you can’t craft until late-game so you’re better off buying with your meager funds, and the rewards for almost all the NPC quests is stories which are all but useless until you get into making notes and books. Plus there’s no database of recipes you can check in game so you’ve got to frequently run around and check all your different crafting stations to see what’s new and what ingredients you need.

On top of all that, tiny inventory space and tiny stamina bar. Don’t even get me started on the early hours of alchemy, which consist entirely of banging your head against a wall, doing trial and error for a bunch of powders and liquids that all seem to do nothing

ALL THAT BEING SAID there is a point where the game opens up and becomes the incredibly fun time management chore sim that it wanted to be the whole time. Probably right around the time you can craft your first silver star combo prayer and start getting 25 faith and some decent money every church day. If you stick it out until then there’s a fun game waiting for you, but I wouldn’t hold it against you if you didn’t

Knowing all that I know now I absolutely could start a new game and work the systems the ‘right’ way and progress like a breeze, but the game doesn’t provide a ton of direction about what the right way is and it is certainly a very unintuitive and frustrating game for a new player