Graveyard Keeper

This is a slightly tough one to recommend. I can't deny playing it somewhat obsessively, but I don't know that I can say I have a ton of fond memories for playing it. Short of the very end of the game, when some automation starts taking off, there is just always so, so, so much that needs to be getting done at any moment. And it's not in the Stardew Valley way, where you'll get to it tomorrow. It's just always piling up, more and more to do, and some of it has to happen on certain days of the in game week, and it's just a lot to keep track of and do. It doesn't encourage healthy gameplay.

The game is also very bleak. From helping burn witches, to helping neighbors do bad things to each other because they hate each other, you'll be forced into doing a lot of bad things if you want to progress the plot. Not even bad for the greater good, but just being rotten.

It's not the break I was looking for from a sometimes bleak and overworked life. I hoped it would paid off, but it really didn't.

But the gameplay is fairly solid, so I'm sure it's the right game for some people. Complements to the devs for making your basic tools not take up valuable inventory slots, and for using the E and F keys to "do" rather than endlessly having to switch between the right tools.

The depth of the trees for upgrading what you can do is really good, and the barriers to getting to the next part of it seem really well thought out. It's a pain to work around, but one that's pushes that Fun button every time you figure out how to get the points you need.

Crafting is really neat, and the ability to automate it later is a huge boon.

The fact that they block you from getting too rich too fast could be annoying, but I think is a good mechanic in the end. It keeps prices from having to ascend into the millions of gold pieces to keep up with what you're bringing in.

While I complain about the schedule with some people only being available once a week, it does keep the town fresh, with specific things that you can only do that day.

It's a good game, with solid design and a lot of plot in it. It wasn't really for me, but I think it's worth a try.

The biggest rabbit hole I have ever played. ADHD on max, even Zelda can't compare with amount of distraction you get while playing this game, you collect the farm, boom corpse arrived, you done with corpse, damn it's a day when you can buy stuff from Astro guy, you do that oh hell nah it's church day need to pray. 12/10 Surgeon's Mistake would recommend 110%

So i must caveat this review by saying I absolutely - and had to for my own sanity - add some mods.
In general I thoroughly enjoyed the game, the macabre farming was pretty fun, the characters were cute and an army of automated zombie slaves was epic. I even enjoyed the day "system" which for me having a colour coded calendar like system was super helpful rather than trying to remember on "Mondays" or the "first day of the month" even if it was a massive pain in the butt if you missed it.
But 10 hours in, what I could absolutely could not stand was walking at snails pace, teleport cooldowns and the most ridic inventory limitations when you've got to walk from one side of the map to the other to pick up/ drop off the one item you almost definitely forgot.
So I got:
A sprint mod
No teleport cool down
Bigger inventory
..and a fishing mod - coz that shit was annoying af too.
I would still say start the game at the intended pace, but when its so painful you could harvest your own organs on an anatomy table... check out some mods for your own sanity :-)

Pros:
+Great art. I have no issues looking at this game at all, and I can be sensitive to that kind of thing.
+Funny characters and dialogue. A few jokes made me laugh out loud.
+Feels cozy somehow, even with the macabre theme.
+Very well-balanced.
+I genuinely enjoy my time playing it.
+Not combat-heavy. I'd even consider it to be rare in this game. You can easily avoid most combat unless you're entering the dungeon, and the enemies I've encountered so far have been weak. Gives me less to worry about, which I like a lot.
+Can be modded!

Cons:
-Incredibly grindy. It's practically a crafting simulator, in which you need y thing for z, but wait, you need x thing for y, but wait, you need w thing for x... yeah, something that you think will take 30 minutes can take 3 hours or more.
-Not intuitive. There's no tutorial at the beginning of the game, which I can certainly appreciate, but if you think you're getting through this game without the wiki... honey, you've got a big storm comin'. No quest tab, no hand-holding. You had better remember the dialogue!
-Lacks customization options. No character creator, can't decorate much... heck, you can't even see your armor on your character when you put it on. As a creative, I'd love more options all around.
-The Town is currently completely inaccessible. Any attempts to go are a waste of time and effort.

Despite my qualms, I do love this game, and will absolutely be recommending it to friends and family. I wish I made more progress with the time that I invest into it, but I still enjoy it, otherwise I wouldn't be playing it. I'd like to see it get even better. 4 stars.

4 days into playing this game I put in 55 hours.
There's a lot of little QOL that could be added and the little inconsistencies reek of Indie game that sold open Beta, got their money and decided "fuck it" and called it a day. Then added 3 DLCs. THAT SAID. It's a fun game. It needs polish.

One of the first quest items you get is useless after its quest and you can't destroy it and there's no such thing as "dropping" items in this game so it forever holds an inventory slot. There's so many different items that you don't know if you need, let alone the fact that the ones you need you require a bajillion of, so that precious 1 inventory slot is an eternal annoyance.
There is no consequence to dying. Which is fine, because their dungeon crawler portion sucks. And the dungeon enemies never respawn. Ever. Nor do the mining nodes in the dungeon. Didn't get that Gem perk early on? Whelp, guess you'll forever miss out on 1 of 4 diamonds in game. Good thing you only need 2 I guess.
While that early quest item cannot be destroyed, there is a quest item you require off specific enemies in the dungeon that can be destroyed. Accidentally washed all your nails or destroyed them? Ope, game is unwinnable.

There's literally no explanation on how to increase the tier of items you can buy off vendors. They expect you to just figure it out.
Need Hops seeds from the Miller? Well that's a tier 2 item and you're only tier 1. You have no reason to think you'd need to buy and sell his flour back to him to increase that tier level because you already have a load of flour you made yourself for a fraction of the cost.

There is no quest log. There's an NPC list that might tell you what that NPC currently wants. If the quest line goes through several NPCs and you fuck off for a while to do some farming have fun figuring out what the fuck you're holding of to X quest item for, or why X NPC won't talk to you about Blank.

There's so many items. So many. Almost all of them unsellable.

Energy is trivial after a certain point, that point being when you start a daily run to collect honey for your never ending thirst for beeswax to make candles. Honey is plentiful and restores a lot of energy. Sure, you get a debuff that drains your energy if you don't sleep for a while, but you can power through it with an infinite supply of honey. Also, that debuff goes away even if you immediately cancel sleep.

Fishing sucks. I didn't like it in Stardew and I like it less here. Same mechanic.

Zombie porter AI is balls. Say you have a zombie transporting Rock and Ore. He's currently loaded on Ore and transporting it to your base, which is full of ore, but out of rock. He will not bring you rock until he drops that Ore either at your base because you made room or because you picked him up because you're tired of his bullshit.

The tavern keeper will buy wine. Which is good, because it sells well! So long as the wine isn't too good. He'll buy Copper and Silver quality. Ope, you made GOLD quality? Get that fancy shit out of my god-damn tavern! At least you can use it for energy and health, but dying has literally no consequences and energy is trivial. Fisher buys your fish. Don't you dare fucking cut it or cook it becuase he likes it raw and wiggling. Tavern keeper's wife sells recipes. 4 of them. She'll sell them to you over and over and over for some reason.

You can set multiple things to craft at once so long as that something doesn't have a variable quality to it. Carrots are carrots and you can cook a load of them. Onions are either copper silver or gold and if they're required for a recipe you have to cook each one individually. But it gets worse because you get only one oven. Babysit your oven simulator.

Anyway I like the gravekeeping portion. No notes except the lack of notes on what removing or inserting body parts does to a body's quality. Embalming? It'll tell you what those injections do. Draining the blood? Figure it the fuck out. Also the gravekeeping becomes irrelevant after a point. Which is really disappointing in a game called "Graveyard Keeper."

The storyline is so vaguely a background detail and every NPC is a caricature. The only one kind of interesting is the talking Skull that tells you how to be a gravekeeper and sort of implies he used to be the previous gravekeeper. But you only have like 2 meaningful interactions with him.

Minor annoyance: Early resource is like every other game of its calibur, STICKS. You get so many sticks you get annoyed with them. Start throwing them in fires for fuel but they're horribly inefficient so you eventually switch off of them to firewood, then later to coal. After a point you don't realize you need sticks for a neverending need for chisels (which unlike literally every other tool you have you can't repair it, you have to make new ones. Oh, and the Steel ones don't work on the things the iron ones do, and vice versa.) and also you need sticks for certain farm plots. OK, we'll just go make some sticks out of this massive pile of logs I've gathered! Oh wait you can't do that for some reason. Well we'll just go find some! Oh, big trees don't drop sticks. Small trees sometimes don't drop sticks. Most bushes are not interactable. You start to wonder where the fuck all your sticks went.

Apparently there's no native controller support? Which is SURPRISING for a game of this style. It's a Harvest Moon clone. You'd think controller support is part of the base expectation.

Game feels like it would have made a great multiplayer experience, too, because there's SO FUCKING MUCH TO DO. Write your books, preach your sermons, Keep your Graveyard, Keep your Farm, bring fish to this guy and bugs to this guy and harvest honey on this side of the map and you need more stone and my god we've run out of ore nodes and can someone take the time to figure out what mats we need to break down this barricade? Grapes don't go with the rest of the farm, you have to grow them up here out of the fucking way
"How much of this is main storyline?" Yes. All of it is. You have to do all of it.

All that said, this game captured my attention for a solid 55 hours. After that I played another 12 hours with rapidly dying interest and never opened it again. But it's neat to see what this game *could* have been. I recommend it just for the time-wasting value alone.

After finally 100%ing this thing, I have to weigh in. This is a vaguely comedic Stardew Valley inspired craft em up where you are some guy that gets Isekai'd and sent to another world after a supernatural disaster. You are placed there as the Graveyard Keeper, who maintains an Ancient Contract that the village values. You also learn that the donkey bringing you bodies is a communist; who proudly displays the "nobody knows what communism actually is" meme as their entire character (yes the donkey talks)

While the game is called Graveyard keeper, and keeping the graveyard is a mechanic, you spend maybe 1% of your time actually doing that. In fact the majority of the game is expanding your crafting so that you can do the 100+ fetch quests in the game. Every single character has a long storyline that gets even longer with all of the DLC, and every quest is some variation of "Bring me this thing to continue the plot" which eventually gives you the mcguffins you need to get home.

The entire game is crafting. You set up a ton of complex production chains, use zombies to automate them, and eventually you make/buy end game items that are traded for the things you need to win. But what kills me is how awful the UI is: Any item where rarity is involved can only be crafted one at a time in a game where everybody wants entire chests full of the stuff. Mass producing a lot of things becomes very, very tiresome.

The DLC staple on a few extra plotlines, in addition their features all tie together
* The Refugee Camp is probably the best of the three. Inventory space is at a premium in this game and this unlocks a variety of bags that make the game far more tolerable. It also mass produces food, which is handy.
* The Souls Room is an attachment to the morgue which unlocks a variety of extra buffs and lets you create higher value bodies. It also has real crematorium ovens which means no more going out to the hill to burn bodies.
* And finally there's the tavern which is just a money printer. When you unlock brewing from the Inquisitor you can sell all the booze in the tavern and make all the coin you need. It also exposes the plot of the game, and even grants us an extra ending that answers a few questions.

It's a fun game but there reachs a point where you recognize that the game is just a grind, and the DLC partially makes it easier but the main issues oft he game never get addressed.

It looks simple but is actually an incredibly complex game. It's terrible at explaining what you need to do to advance so you will be spending a lot of time googling for answers. But even with that it's still a very fun game if you're willing to put some time in.