izigame.me

Stranger Sins is a supplementary DLC that fleshes out the game's backstory and fills in certain gaps in the game's mechanics. It contextualizes many of the more mysterious elements in the game's world building. It provides another source of income and a reason to produce alcohol and food for profit. It adds an event system where you can host parties and venues at your tavern in order to produce large sums of money. It's an overall good DLC, though a bit difficult to utilize without starting a fresh save.

The DLC becomes available after you give Gerry some silver star wine, at which point he recalls a particular memory from his past related to the old Keeper. After a bit of running around and searching, and paying a few pricey fees, you construct a tavern in the village proper and set up shop.

There are three points of interest in this DLC. The tavern's ability to passively make money, the tavern event system, and the additional story.

First, the tavern's money making ability. By default, it can be used to sell alcohol to its patrons. After recruiting a bartender, he will passively sell any alcohol you stock to customers, and generate a modest amount of income for you to collect. This income is based on the quality of the drinks you offer and the overall quality of your tavern. You can even automate this, making a production chain from your vineyards to your cellar, and then from your cellar to your tavern. The money invested in the tavern can quickly pay for itself with even a small amount of drink.
Getting the tavern, however, is very much a midgame goal. You're unlikely to be able to field enough capital to get the tavern up and running, and you probably wont be able to access the infrastructure necessary to run it until you've got automation. If you get the tavern too early, it'll just sit there for a while. If you get it too late, you might not need it anymore.
I would probably call this mechanic pay 2 win, more jokingly than anything, but it really speeds up the midgame in terms of reaching the late game money gates required by certain questlines. If you're willing to put in the time to get it set up, you'll probably be able to finish the base game significantly faster using this mechanic.

Second, there is the tavern event system. As you sell alcohol in your tavern, you gain "reputation". Reputation can be spent by holding an event at your tavern. An event might be a comedy act, or a feast, or a musical number. This brings in a larger number of patrons to your tavern, and generates money based on how well you cater the event.
Speaking of which, your tavern can also sell food to its customers, but only during an event. Various foods you create in your kitchen, or in the tavern's kitchen, can be given to your bartender for sale. When an event is hosted, he will sell his inventory to any customers attending the event. This generates a particularly large amount of money.
However, certain foods are only suited to certain events, and how you would know largely comes down to blind experimentation. For example, the feast does well with beer and onion rings, but the comedy act seems more suited to wine and stews. While you don't necessarily take a hit for choosing the wrong things, it is still a bit odd that there is even a distinction to begin with. I'm reminded of the alchemy mechanics, where you just had to keep trying over and over again until you succeeded, or just looked it up in a guide.

Finally, we have the additional story that comes with the tavern. I'm going to tread lightly here to avoid spoilers.
The whole reason the tavern is constructed in the first place is to uncover more of the backstory about The Village. The tavern is just there to hide the real hustle, which is searching for items of historical interest in the town. Gerry sends you around the town to many of the NPCs, and you attempt to persuade them to hand over something of value related to the village's history.
Actually gathering the items can be a bit of a hassle. Many of the NPCs will daisy chain objectives across multiple people. You'll start with one guy wanting an item from another guy, but that other guy will only talk to you if your tavern is upgraded, and you can't upgrade your tavern until you talk to someone else. Keeping track of all the chains can become confusing, and you'll often find yourself focusing on a single item at a time. You'll probably have to consult the NPC task list and then walk the logic back each time you forget what to do.
In some cases, these quest chains can be enjoyable, as you get to see a bit more of the largely forgettable NPC side characters. At the same time, I can't help but wonder if this could have been handled differently. Maybe these chains didn't need to be as long, or perhaps they could have given me a production task rather than a fetch quest.
With items in hand, and using a sort of pseudo item-history-recall, you peer into the past and learn the rough sequence of events that lead to the construction of The Town and The Village. You'll also get some explanation of the rather vague things mentioned at the beginning of the game, like The Contract or why there is a Graveyard Keeper.
Overall, the story-telling device is rather neat, and the plot links up all the characters quite nicely without being overblown or hammy. I appreciated that, in replaying the game, I had a different perspective on the characters and their plight, but not so much that Graveyard Keeper felt that much different than the first time I played through. It answered a lot of questions, but still left a lot of mystery. You gave me context and world-building, but without destroying the magic of the original concept.

Of course, the DLC has its ups and downs.
On the positive, the tavern and the events fill in little gaps in the progression that felt lacking before. Crafting food and alcohol makes sense now, whereas before you either severely limited your production, or you painstakingly sold it at a loss to a vendor. Since the tavern can dump both at excess, producing those items suddenly makes a lot more sense. The money produced by this also helps you meet the money goals that crop up later in the game.
At the same time, however, the usefulness of the tavern and the time it takes to get it set up creates a very small window for you to really take advantage of it. Start too early, and it's just dead weight you can't utilize. Start too late, and you wont need anything the tavern has to offer. It's a thread the needle scenario.
I highly recommend starting a new save if you decide to do the DLC. The tavern is far more engaging when you actually have a stake in what it produces. If you only care about the story, then you can probably shotgun the tavern using an endgame save, but you'll miss out on some of it's features.

At this point, I would say that the DLC is good enough for what it sets out to accomplish. I was expecting some extra story with a tavern gimmick, and what I got felt more like content they wanted to add to the base game, but ran out of time to do so. It rounds out many of the gaps in the mechanics, and gives us a bit more world building to help contextualize the story. If you enjoyed the base game, then it is well worth playing.

Steam Curator