Recently Cheerful Ghost went to an event put on by local PDX indie game developers Moonlight Kids showing off their upcoming game The Wild at Heart. Justin Baldwin was awesome enough to talk to us about the game and their upcoming show at Double Fine’s Day of the Devs convention!

Check out more about Moonlight Kids and The Wild at Heart here: https://www.moonlightkids.co/wild-at-heart

Rumor has it that Nintendo is working on a new version of the Switch! Red Dead Redemption 2 takes nearly 100gb of hard drive space on your console! We played and watch some things! Come listen as we talk about all of this fun stuff.

In this extra spooky episode, we played Ghosts 'n Goblins and were haunted by the experience!

Ghosts 'n Goblins is a brutally difficult action platformer on the NES and NES Classic that has delighted and tormented people for decades. It spawned a sequel on the SNES, two spin-off series, and a few thousand broken controllers probably.

In this episode of Cheerful Ghost Radio, Adam and Jon are on the floor at PRGE talking about all the fun they're having while Tim and Travis sit at home and wish they were there.

In this episode, we talk all about Matt Groening's new Netflix series, Disenchantment, and whether we think it lives up to the standard of The Simpsons and Futurama. But first we discuss what we've been playing and watching over the last month and discuss games that might not need sequels (thanks to @noigelarcane on Twitter for the idea).

Netflix is on fire lately, releasing new movies and shows at light speed. Recently they released Hold the Dark, by Jeremy Saulnier (director of Blue Ruin and The Green Room) and in this episode Jon and Travis give their reviews and talk about some of the fan reaction. If your hyper-specific Netflix categories suggest that you watch dark, slower paced, mysterious, cerebral movies, check out Hold the Dark and then come check out the episode!

In the newest episode of Cheerful Ghost Radio yet, we talk about the home release of Avengers: Infinity War, how our thoughts have changed since we saw it in the theater, and the extra stuff on the Blu-Ray.

But because it's us, and we love talking about Star Wars... we talk about Star Wars first.

In this episode we ponder what makes a good game sequel. This started as a conversation between Jon and Travis and as we discussed and debated sequels we decided this would be the perfect topic for an episode of Cheerful Ghost Radio! Have a listen and let us know what you think: what makes a good sequel, and what are some of your favorites?

In this episode of Cheerful Ghost Radio, we're talking all about Kirby's Adventure!

Kirby's Adventure was the sequel to Kirby's Dream Land, and is the first game to introduce Kirby's copy ability. It was developed by Hal Laboratory in 1993, late in the lifespan of the NES. Come check out our thoughts on the game and the legacy of the Kirby series in this pink and puffy episode of Cheerful Ghost Radio!

In season two of Cheerful Ghost Radio we are doing bite-sized NES Classic review episodes. We want to make you all part of these episodes, so if you want to join in the fun, head here and join in the event for next month's NES Classic review, Metroid!

https://cheerfulghost.com/Travis/events/165/cheerful-ghost-games-club-metroid

While we have you here: what kind of games from the NES Classic and SNES Classic would you like to hear us review? Would you prefer the SNES era over the NES era? If you have suggestions, head over to Cheerful Ghost and let us know!

Note: tinyBuild provided us with a copy of this game for review because they're awesome. Thanks tinyBuild!

I'm having withdrawal from Graveyard Keeper. It's the kind of game that gets under your skin and has you thinking about game logic when doing day-to-day things. The grocery store is a nightmare: "No, I don't need apples, I have about 50 of those in my trunk. Wait... that's not real life, Travis." According to Steam, it took 45 hours for me to beat the game but I could have happily gone another 45. I didn't intend to wait until I beat it to write this review, it's just that I couldn't stop playing it.

If you've played a farming sim, Graveyard Keeper will feel familiar. The most obvious comparison is Stardew Valley, but comparing the two is a little unfair to both games. In short, you die, and you wake up in this medieval town where you are tasked with managing a graveyard. You don't know why, and you're just trying to get home, but you go along with hit. In order to manage your graveyard you have to saw lumber to make simple grave plots at first, then stone and marble. In order to keep getting bodies you have to keep the delivery donkey happy with carrots. In order to use the garden you have to make a deal with a merchant to sell crates of veggies... and so on. There are 6 main NPC quest lines that all interact in some way, and these will require you to use skills from a bunch of different skill trees. Things can get complicated.

You upgrade your skill trees based on three types of experience earned from physical, natural, and mindful tasks. Toward the mid-game, you'll start to need faith and science, which are somewhere between experience points and currency. Also toward the mid-game, what might seem like a simple craft gets complex. You need to make Craft A at your anvil, but that requires Craft B from your Furnace, which requires Craft C from a pottery wheel which you don't even have, and Craft D from Alchemy and... yeah, have a wiki open when you play this.

The graphics are well-done in charming pixel art reminiscent of the late 16-bit era. I had to check to see if the music was done by the same composer as Terraria, and that's a compliment. Some of it sounds like the same style, but more importantly it's pleasant and unobtrusive. You're going to be hearing the same few tracks over and over again. Much like Terraria, the music is fantastic for setting the mood and doesn't get old after the 200th time you hear it.

So yes, I loved Graveyard Keeper as you can tell. It's a chill, relaxing game like Stardew Valley, and has the same pros and cons of the genre. However, it held my interest way more because it has a tighter focus with the quests and a more complex and deep crafting system. Whereas with some games like this you can specialize in one or two crafts, in Graveyard Keeper you have to at least use all of them. Once you get a good income moving there are options to skip crafts by just buying stuff, but you'll at least have to get your feet wet with all the tech trees, and I like that about it.

A few minor issues though.

Some stuff feels like it's trying to pad out the grind. You can only carry one log/slab at a time so you spend a lot of time going back and forth to transport stuff. And in general, energy is drained really fast. There are times where you're sleeping 2/3 of the day or more because you need to craft some stuff that drains you fast. There's always a bed nearby so nothing is really lost, and you can craft food to restore energy as well. It's just a little taxing and feels like things take about twice as much energy as they should sometimes. From what I've read, this seems to be the big sticking point for a lot of people who love Stardew Valley but don't care for this. It wasn't enough to put me off by any means but it's noticeable and I'd prefer some balancing on the grind.

There are fighting mechanics that are somewhat rudimentary. There's a dungeon you must traverse for some quest items, but other than that you can mostly ignore the fighting, and that's a good thing because those are not the strongest. Everything about fighting feels clunky, and the same energy system that you use for most actions in the game gets drained super fast in the dungeon.

Then there's the fishing system which I did almost nothing with, because it isn't very fun and the window to start reeling in the fish is punishingly small.

Plus, there are some skills/recipes that you can unlock which do absolutely nothing. The highest level woodworking unlock is a piece that isn't used in anything. Maybe it's a tease for things to come in DLC, or maybe it's something that got cut but they missed this? Not sure.

The biggest issue for me, though, was a game-breaking bug. I was able to fix it with a save editor, but it's a problem. One NPC, Snake, will just stop showing up once his quests are done. I was under the (admittedly mistaken) impression that I couldn't progress in the Astrologer's quest until I was fully done with Snake's. But then when I continued the Astrologer's quest I needed to get something from Snake and he was just gone from the game. I had a save backup but it would have meant losing 12ish hours of progress, so luckily the save editor worked. I just hope it doesn't break anything in the future if there's DLC. But this is a warning to you: try not to ignore any of the six main quests or things might get broken like this. I love Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and No Man's Sky so I'm used to some crazy bugs in my games, but this one hurt a bit. It's not a common issue (since I guess most people do the quest earlier) but I've seen a few other people who ran into the same problem when researching it.

To their credit, Lazy Bear Games have been updating the game a lot post-launch to fix things, so hopefully this gets addressed. I think with a bit more polish and some rebalancing of the grind this could be even better.

But overall the issues don't pull it down. This is a game that won't be for everyone, not by a long shot. If you don't like the idea of grinding for resources, skip this. Seriously, that's most of the game, just figuring out what resources you need to grind and then doing it. But for me, it hit the perfect gameplay loop to keep me tied to it during basically all of my free hours. I had frustrations but I constantly wanted more.

If you like the farm sim games and want one that's a little more taxing, humorous, and full of corpses, you'll have a blast with Graveyard Keeper!