Greenhearth Necromancer || A Demo

I had the delightful chance to try out the Greenhearth Necromancer demo on Tuesday, and damn, I’m sold.

I’m not normally one for “cozy” games, as a marketing term, the goal is to evoke the likes of Legends and Lattes or Stardew Valley. Low stakes, often character focused, narratives with forgiving primary gameplay loops.

However, most come across as edgeless narratives where bland characters calmly explain the tropes they’ve been assigned, and boring gameplay loops repeated ad nauseam while steadfastly refusing to interrogate what actions they ask the player or character to perform.

For the best example of this issue, and why so many “cozy” games play host to fascist nests, I recommend Gio’s Article, “A wholesome plane has hit the second cozy tower.”

Greenhearth Necromancer is not one of those, at least so far. It is a demo after-all. Which is admittedly the reason I won’t be voicing any of the graphical or visual design issues I ran into as they’re clearly still a work in progress.

Instead, it reminds me of Spirit City, if you replaced the productivity elements with keeping a dozen plates spinning gameplay of Cultist Simulator then mixed in the visual style of Potion Craft. It’s not an idle clicker game, but it’s not… not that?

I’m struggling to say what the goal of the game is, for the same reason I struggle to say what the goal of gardening is.

You play as a young necromancer, (from the pride flags in the codices, a nonbinary trans person) taking over their late grandmother’s rent controlled apartment.

While you play a necromancer, your grandmother, Rose, was a powerful Greenwitch who maintained a luscious balcony garden, as we’ll soon learn, much to the delight of her neighbors.

The garden has, naturally, died. So, you begin tossing dead plants into the compost bin only to discover Rose’s adorable compost familiar, Compostifer, has been waiting for you. Rose wanted you to make the garden and apartment your own, using your own magic to do so, and asked Compostifer to encourage and assist you.

After you’ve revivified your first plant into undeath, you begin meeting your neighbors, who so often come to you baring nearly, or fully, dead plants for you to resuscitate. Thus does the primary loop expose itself as you balance activity cards, while keeping your plants watered, fertilized, and pruned. Some activity cards drive the narrative forward, while others act more like random encounters with neighbors and provide or sap Social Battery, the same energy you use for your plant revitalizing spells. It’s a cute way of making the player balance a social life and keeping their growing mountain of foliage alive. Of course, if you fail, you can keep them unalive instead.

I compared it to Cultist Simulator earlier and this is where that really manifests. Where Cultist Sim feels more like keeping a series of saw blades spinning; knowing full-well dropping one will probably kill you, Greenhearth is more akin to a dining table covered in lazy-susans. The most you risk for over or under spinning one is time. Like, if you’re too focused on reviving plants and burn all your social battery, and you only have a few “knock” cards, you’re gonna be waiting around for a bit till the invisible cooldown flips and you draw something new that might give you some social battery.

It’s almost like it’s encouraging you to walk away or second screen the game. Let the music play. Let your plants go. If they’re still alive when you get back, great, if not, well, hopefully we’ll have drawn enough “nesting” cards to get everyone you don’t want to compost back up.

While living and undead plants of the same variety have the same requirements, there are some gameplay differences. Only undead plants can be affected by your spells, and they can bloom, drawing ghostly bees. There’s only one bee scene in the demo so I won’t spoil it, but it does lay out the direction I expect the narrative is going to take.

If I have to raise an issue, it’s that the game feels oddly paced. It’s positioned as an idle game, very much a second screen experience, but the way water and fertilizer drain and activity cards refill are obfuscated or hidden under contextual menus. Thus, it lacks a simple visual or audio cue to draw you back when something requires your attention.

I have similar issues with the menu design. It feels more at home on a touch screen the way every menu must be expanded then tabbed through to the proper option.

Not to end on a sour note, I do wish to bring up another element I quite liked, though your mileage may vary.

I appreciate that interactions with characters are expressly, not about gaining or losing friendship with them. You can react poorly to George’s kinda bigoted gut reactions to your necromancy then throw her a bit of a mental curve ball by reacting positively when she offers you a dead plant soon after. The writing in the character interactions feels so natural in the way it acknowledges that to err is human. We don’t shun our friends or even our neighbors because they put their foot in their mouth sometimes.

My demo actually crashed at one point, I don’t think it had anything to do with the game itself, as my stream also broke twice during my 5 and some hour play session, so I suspect it was my computer. I wasn’t enthused it ate my save, but it did give me a chance to test some of the game’s early choices a second time. And because of that, I must say, the writing plays with the illusion of choice beautifully, usually constraining the direct reaction to your choice to the first half of the response while the back half tends to progress down the same path.

I would like to see a more upfront focus on queerness, though I’d always like that. I’d especially like to see more exploration of gender given our character is implied to be trans (bite me, yeah, I want cis players to HAVE to experience a trans perspective).

I’d also like to see more with Demeter Cosmo so they don’t end up as yet another token they/them character with no exploration of their relationship with gender to throw onto the pile; doubly so when advertising a writer who could bring a personal perspective to them.

I look forward to seeing more of Greenhearth Necromancer and suspect you might see it appearing during my Tarkov loading screens for a while. You can wishlist it and try the demo on stream now.

As a side note, the, I assume, intentionally obfuscated mechanics, which so reminded me of Cultist Simulator, also made me think of this game design article by Ralph Koster, and I really just wanted a chance to share that in case I have cause to talk about them more *cough cough*.