Graveyard Keeper

This could be a great game. With a great, and morbid, sense of humor. With interesting characters, And a promising tech tree and crafting system. But as it stands august 2018 the game has a flawed and messy gameplay. Half your inventory is wasted with tools and junk. Lot of the tech tree is a waste of time and feels unfinished. Energy management is clearly unbalanced with a steep learning curve. Early game you will waste a lot of time constantly running out of energy. Then slightly later energy is a walk in the park. Once you get rolling, this fun loving little game start harassing you routinely with deadlocking further progress through grindy timewasting quests that block further progress. Fantastic gameplay. Which reminds me; Quest management reminds me of the RPG's from 1990's. Where I commonly had pen and paper on the desk with the computer, to make notes. There's more, It might be details I've overlooked in the "tutorial" but I'm constantly looking up everything in a wiki to figure out how to use it. Often this dead ends in unfinished features or even worse, useless features. I guess part of the games humor is the developers joke on my expense. Game is 90% finished, it just lacks the last 90% of the work polishing its features. I give up for now, thankfully I've seen atleast 3-4updates, almost one pr day since launch. But in my not so humple optionon, it's requires a lot of feature tweaking and cleanup to bring this game to a streamlined experience like stardew or facorio mentioned by other reviewers.

Its good game, too much grind, but still very good. Its fun, its look good, its not so long and it can become more. i hope that it will become start of great series. With black humor and much fun. Lets all hope for this ;)

The style of the game is exactly as you can see from the previews; the actual game adds a lot of entertaining and funny ideas, dialogue, and stories. But after playing it for a few hours, you'll notice the progression is broken; the curve goes rapidly into an endless grind, with what feels like an exponential increase. Taking step n may require 10 rat tails, but n+1 is not just 100, it's 1000 already; and step n+5 is required to unlock... you get the picture. Could have been a fun little game if it had been playtested. What is now, is an unsatisfactory waste of time.

Played about 50 hours total: 15h - 20h autum 2018 and continuing on a save, 30h-35h as of July 2019. I'm probably somewhere late mid game- early late game technology wise. Pros; + Aesthetic + Many, many hours of play and content + Technology Trees + economics mid-late game + patches, bug fixes and (hopefully) more good content to come. Cons; - Slow start* - grind - economics early game* - Wiki, becomes a must from mid to late game** Changes; (I've noticed) + much less grind than before + Zombies (dlc, but free for pc?) *may have changed since release. ** wiki reduces grind and confusion substantially When I ordered this game I compared it in my mind to Stardew Valley, (which I also would rate 4/5), the biggest pull of SV was the positive emotions you had towards the people. In Graveyard Keeper, it's more a bit more about the (literal and figurative) hustles you choose to do, in an effort to get money, and expand your options. Like did I remember to impersonate a priest for church this week, or do you pick flowers and try to sell for pennies? The economics system is a lot tougher in this game, and I think it adds more character to the game for it. It's not going to hold your hand very much, and you don't get a lot, you have to expand and refine your products to start earning. The strong point of this game is taking in the atmosphere, while expanding in the areas you find most interesting, which is why I've barely touched the fishing pole. For me, Stardew Valley is more of a wholesome Coke, while Graveyard Keeper is more of a Morbidly interesting Pepsi, and I'm excited to see how far it down I get.

I want to try and keep this brief, so here's the highlights up-front: The Good - Surprisingly engaging story and interesting characters (with the DLC), great sense of progression, absolutely amazing animation and world art, "Zombie Autiomation" is really intuitive and works quite well, amount of content and pacing is near perfect - always lots to do but never got "decision paralysis" The Bad - To get a good story requires the DLC, Numerous game glitches even after patching, UI is minimalist to the point of frustration, English writing has numeous spelling/grammer errors, DLC unbalances the economy which already wasn't great I had quite a bit of enjoyment with the game, from surprising directions, even, but I can absolutely state that it's not going to be for everyone. This is definitely an "indie" game in the truest since, both good and bad. For every "good", there is a "bad" to go with it. If you get this game, you need to a) Be a fan of Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley already, b) Get the DLC if you want the actual complete game, and c) Be prepared for glitches and writing errors throughout everything (seriously, it's clear the QA and English editing was not good enough) and d) Be ready to consult a wiki from the lack of in-game guidance and player information. That said, if you can get past those (admittedly big) hurdles, you'll find a beautifully detailed world that's full of lore and interesting characters to learn about, and lots of discoveries to make everywhere, all while having a close-knit feel that gives a more intimate experience then typical sandbox games. Depth is the name of the game, and the game gives that to you in spades, and though you have to dig deep to get to it, you'll find real nuggets of joy burried here. Overall, a good - if unpolished - little game. Not for everyone, but for those that fit the mold, they'll find the fit very comfortable.