Fetching beer, cooking meals, fighting slimes, sharpening swords, picking berries, mining for stone, chopping down trees, all just an average day for a Graveyard Keeper. Oh, burying bodies? I did that twice during my first hour of the game.
Graveyard Keeper is much more than a graveyard sim. It has a life around it, a village to visit, relationships to maintain. I’d likely compare it to Stardew Valley had I ever played that game. The dark humor in this game sets it apart, and it delivers in the weirdest ways. I was given a task to trade corpse meat I’d ‘autopsied’ off the dead (yes, for consumption), and I was shanghaied into attending a witch burning. The game promises cults, undead, and more goodies in the future.
The menus offers tons of skills to learn, and gravedigging is only a small part of it. Crafting, cooking, gardening, and all other sorts. Sometimes it isn’t clear where to do something; I had a lot of flour but could not figure out how to put water with it to make dough. I had water from the well, but needed to alter it somehow. I also never found out where to turn ore into iron bars. Those are just two examples. The blueprint system in the game seems to require a certain place to perform any action, and I didn’t know where to go.
Also the game is just… slow. Maybe I’m spoiled by games like Stacklands, but in one hour of GK I buried two people, attended a burning, killed two slimes, cooked some meat, repaired a corpse dropoff hatch, and decorated some graves. That’s it. I made very little progress toward any goal, and anytime I wanted to walk toward town I had to dedicate a minute or so to just walking there. I don’t have the patience for this type of game. I have the same problem with the game Don’t Starve, and this feels slower than that.
The town runs on a schedule, and I could imagine learning the things that take place on certain days so I could unravel the secrets of the town. Unlocking new areas of the cellars, learning to sell and trade and repurpose bodies, and earning a place in this world seems like it would be satisfying. I just don’t have the patience for it, and the unclear path forward to crafting better things just makes that all the worse.
Verdict: 1 hour played, or about 4.5 days in-game.
Kyle Adams 