Graveyard Keeper
Graveyard Keeper is the most inaccurate medieval cemetery management sim of all time. Build and manage your own graveyard, and expand into other ventures, while finding shortcuts to cut costs. Use all the resources you can find. After all, this is a game about the spirit of capitalism, and doing whatever it takes to build a thriving business. And it’s also a love story. Face ethical dilemmas. Do you really want to spend money on that proper burger meat for the witch-burning festival, when you have so many resources lying around? Gather valuable materials and craft new items. Expand your Graveyard into a thriving business. Help yourself — gather the valuable resources scattered across the surrounding areas, and explore what this land has to offer. Quests and corpses. These dead bodies don't need all those organs, do they? Why not grind them up and sell them to the local butcher? Or you can go on proper quests, you roleplayer.
Steam User 122
Pros:
- Beautiful, consistent visuals.
- Memorable sound design.
- Great characters/narrative.
- Satisfying controls.
Combine all that together and you get a truly immersive story.
Cons:
- Restrictive customization, especially with how you lay out your graveyard.
- No character customization, not even clothes/hats.
- There is nothing to do after you complete the base game. No ambient objectives, no big-ticket items to work toward.
- No specialization. You are expected to unlock everything, you only get to pick the order you do it.
Combine all that and you get a game that has zero replay value.
I can't recommend the DLC, and here's why:
- Customization is just as restrictive in the DLC areas.
- There is still very little to work toward. No new big-ticket items. No challenging areas.
- New money-making methods fall flat because of the lack of end-game goals.
- Specialization/decision making is still non-existent.
Graveyard Keeper is a beautiful game that I'm happy I experienced, but I probably won't pick it up again for years, if ever. There's not enough personal attachment because there's so little choice. There's nothing keeping me hooked because I already did everything. DLC just gives me more of the same.
I'd love to see those issues addressed, but even if they never are I do still recommend this game. The things Graveyard Keeper does right are so excellent that I've felt their absence in every crafting/farm sim I've played since.
Steam User 115
Do you love digging up bodies and committing acts of unlicensed surgery on them so you can:
- extract their organs so you can study them in a dungeon
- tear off some skin to use as leather for some armour
- mess with a corpse for the fun of it
before dumping it in a river that leads to the town where people probably drink the water and wonder why it tastes weird lately. If you are not into that, you could just put high quality corpses in graves so the church cemetery has a higher rating and you get bonuses for your hard work.
Do you hate being able to know how to craft things in the beginning of a game? Well this game does not properly explain things and you will wonder how the fuck you are supposed to make a wooden anvil (its some catch 22 bullshit) before eventually gaining the materials from quests or in some barrels.
Hours of fun are to be had trying to figure out how to gain blue tech points. You will search for ways to get them online, but all the websites won't help you, because they only tell you ways you can get those points after constructing a research table or other methods which require those blue points to do in the first place. Truly an amazing experience. Then you find an astronomer dude and waste all your precious money on books so you can actually have blue points.
Some guy will tell you he wants you to grow vegetables, but you will not be able to find where the fuck this farmer is that sells these seeds even though there are like 3 farms in the town, none of which seem to have an NPC that will actually sell you seeds.
Maybe the game is a little bit frustrating but desecrating corpses and decorating graves for the end goal of getting back home and seeing your wife or girlfriend or whatever relationship that female had with the main character - maybe his stepsister, I dunno (I forgot) - is all worth it. This is a good game in the 'Main character finds himself in some strange town and has to do a whole lot of hard work just to get back home, also they are probably dead or in a coma' genre. The main character telling everyone that everyone is calling him the graveyard keeper and he doesn't know why reminds me of the main character in Harvester - everyone in town would say "You always were a kidder Steve".
Also I love the art style and if you don't then... I hope you step on some Lego and die from a yeast infection. Are you blind? Have you seen how about 99.99% of pixel graphics games on Steam look? I wasn't expecting the quality before I bought it, I just bought it because I have masochistic spending habits.
This is an excellent game for people like me who lost their sanity long ago.
Steam User 91
TLDR: If you like this kind of game you must play this one with the wiki open. And honestly, that wasn't even enough for me. Usually I ended up googling "How do I get RESOURCE" and getting the answer from Reddit or an article because the fan Wiki is kind of bad.
I like Graveyard keeper a lot. But this came very close to being a "do not recommend".
I like the goal of the gameplay loop. I like the way the tech tree works. I absolutely love that you can sleep whenever you want during the day to get your energy back.
I'm very use to playing games with a wiki open. I have thousands of hours in old school rune scape, a game where it is culturally considered mandatory to read about content on the wiki before trying it so you can get a good gist of what to expect. I use the stardew valley mod that basically puts the wiki in the game.
Graveyard keeper feels like it knows that players will use wikis and went "Neat, less work for me."
It felt like every time I unlocked a new tool or ability I was frustrated to find out that I need a new surprise resource I've never even heard of to use it. And a often times it wasn't anything I had seen referenced or mentioned in game by anyone, meaning I might as well just google "How do I get X" or "How do I make Y" because the game hasn't even given me the smallest hint as to where to start with it.
So many times I've unlocked an early game progression path only to find out "Don't worry about this. You still have to go unlock 2 other things to use this. See you then." Which just makes you want to hit your head against a wall. I would have just picked to progress those two other paths first if I had known!
I'm going to keep playing. I'm enjoying it, I'll just be defaulting to the wiki a lot sooner instead of trying to figure out anything in game myself to be honest, which does take a little of the magic out of it.
Steam User 66
I really wanna love this game, but it's stressful for me to play. It doesn't explain even remotely as much as it should. I have to tab out and Google something so often, it's hard to enjoy playing it. There just needs to be more information readily available in-game. There are also some irritating things about placement. You should be able to move things around. If you place something right next to the well, you can't walk around it and it acts funky when you try to use it. One of my zombies also disappeared when I tried to place him there for work. Definitely seems like an unpolished game. Like it should be in early access still. I don't like that the quest information is so minimal and as vague as it can possibly be, and for some reason, grouped with the NPC tab. I don't understand that at all. I'll have to Google every quest in the game just to remember or figure out what it needs because all it says is something like, "Help the witch with her memory". Okay?? Help me with mine! lol!
Steam User 72
Its like a macabre version of stardew valley thats less polished and late game was clearly rushed in development.
Got it on sale for $3.99 highly recommend it for that price. Got 55 hours of gameplay out of it
Steam User 97
Good points:
-The art style is truly beautiful.
-The gameplay is incredibly enjoyable, especially for the first 20 hours.
Bad points:
-The game becomes overly extensive as you progress.
-Although the gameplay is good initially, it becomes increasingly repetitive and boring as the game goes on.
Quest NPCs only appear on specific days of the week, which can be frustrating if you miss them and have to wait a whole week for their return.
-You can't sleep unless your character has no energy left, so, no easy way to pass time.
-The DLCs are necessary as they contain crucial content, but they are quite expensive.
Review
Overall, this review was almost negative, but I decided to give it a positive rating because the first few hours were genuinely relaxing and enjoyable.
Steam User 44
(TLDR at the end)
I see a lot of people compare this game to Stardew Valley, which in itself is a fair comparison, but it falls flat on a few things.
First and foremost: this game has a lot more moving parts than Stardew. It's got a more complex crafting system which can be an initial deterrent for people looking for a more chill experience. You need to earn points by chopping trees, harvesting foliage, or doing research to even unlock recipes, which can result in quite a bit of grinding. And on top of that, even gathering the necessary materials to do said crafting is different, as (for example) you have to cut down trees and gradually refine them into wooden planks you can use for even basic crafting. If anything, purely based on the crafting aspect of the game, it should be compared more-so to something like Minecraft or Vintage Story instead of Stardew which has a sub-par crafting mechanics. That being said, the research aspect of it almost reminds me of a tycoon game, which is kinda fun coming from an rpg-esque game.
Also, this game's story has you in a headlock pretty much as soon as you boot it up. Not to spoil anything, but it gives just enough ambiguity to have you wondering about how and why you're here managing a graveyard. Having an alcoholic talking skull be essentially the game's version of a tutorial is a very nice touch and adds a lot of personality to playthroughs, as its banter feels more fleshed out than just "press x to interact", "use wasd to move" as most tutorial npcs are. Plus, although the towns people tend to be very standoff-ish, everything they do fits in very well with the over-arching story and adds a level of believability to the characters.
Plus, I mean. It's a game where you work as a mortician who essentially sells human meat. It's macabre. If you're not into that kinda dark-humor, then why are you here? Lol.
TLDR: More complex farming sim with corpses. Lots of grinding, but fun. Nicely written.