Graveyard Keeper

If you loved Stardew for it's freedom and moment to moment fun then this is not the game for you, maybe it's better later on but I'm not going to waste hours on something hoping that it will eventually be fun. The main issue I have with this game is the lack of basic quality of life features like being able to move your work stations instead of having a jumbled unstructured mess, and the fact that for most of your playthrough you're going to be cluelessly climbing the tech tree, getting technologies with items that won't be accessible till you get another tech tree or build another work station. Every part of it felt tedious and like I had no true agency with what I was doing, simply going through the motions while being instructed on what to do by a guide on my second screen. I'm going back to Stardew.

I really wanted to like this game. Beautiful art direction and music. Great theme. Equally lighthearted and macabre. On paper; this would be my favourite game. Overly convoluted and tangled mess. Had to rely on online wiki to get even basic tasks done. Almost every aspect of gameplay more complicated than it needs to be. Tasks end up feeling like chores, and playing the game is almost as tiring as doing said chores in real life. After some eight hours I threw in the towel. This is a sub-par Stardew Valley in a really cool Halloween outfit. Also, you never get to ride the donkey. Shame.

If you like time management sim games and you are a fan black, twisted, politically incorrect and slightly sadistic humor - Graveyard Keeper is a game for you :) There are few minor bugs, but with each update and / or DLC there are fewer and fewer. Generally, you're playing as graveyard keeper (what a surprise! :P ), so you have to take care of the bodies, do autopsies, bury them or burn or throw into a river - your choice ;) . You have to take care of your own church and cemetery by building benches and graves, and to do that you need to collect stone and wood, make planks and nails (or hiring zombies to do that for you) and so on... You can also develop your alchemy or kitchen skills, plant vegetables (btw. carrots are your "currency" to get new bodies, but The Donkey in the game will explain you the details) and sell the crops in the town. In the meantime, you will play as the detective, finding out who with whom did what and when - some of the townsfolk are really twisted, and finding your way home, as you are not where you belong... Nice graphics, pleasant music, easy to learn game mechanics but giving you a lot of options how to play, story full of twists and jokes. I really enjoyed both, the gameplay and the story. Please note, if you like inappropriate dark humor (like let say "Elvira: the mistress of darkness" or "Dracula: dead and loving it") you will enjoy the game; if you do not enjoy cutting off someones intestines an making it into powder so you can use it in your elixir, pick something else ;)

The initial conceit for Graveyard Keeper isn't bad, you get isekai'd by Truck-kun and are suddenly the keeper of a local graveyard. There's some rather black humor as you're taught how to dissect corpses as they come in which quickly turns into your own personal organ harvesting operation for purposes of reanimating the dead, performing alchemy and blood rituals, and selling human meat back to the townsfolk. Nobody asks where the local gravedigger is getting all this meat from and nobody seems to care. And really, that's this game in a nutshell. A lot of setup, a lot of potential, but you're perpetually left holding your breath as you go through the daily routine for the millionth time waiting for there to ever be any real payoff. It's fun for a while as the steady trickle of features is introduced to you, but once that trickle begins to dry up you realize you're basically playing Zombie Harvest Moon except none of the characters stand out, nothing is written with the intent of taking it seriously, and the game's central driving force isn't to find your own pace or get better at your operation, it's to find all possible means of mitigating the grind while doing about 200 simultaneous fetch quests. Even after busting your butt to get a town pass, you never actually get to go to the town everyone's always yammering about. This is to say nothing of the moment to moment shortcomings with how much the UI fails to communicate, how terrible the game is at explaining itself, the ways in which you can screw yourself over, or the lack of direction as to what your primary tasks should be at any given time to pace yourself properly. It is a graveyard/farming sim with neither the writing nor the mechanical depth to sustain itself for the utterly ridiculous amount of time it asks of you to spend doing the same thing over and over (even once you've wrung out all its existing content) until some arbitrary counter is filled. It's a potentially fun but very shallow experience.

...a nice playing experience of a moral-free harvest moon/stardew valley in the vicinity of a graveyard. For me (Sim-, Strategy-Lover) it's a lot of fun till now, who wouldn't want to eat that human-steak? ;-) Not experiencing bugs till now, it's a little bit on the grinding side with resources, but as there are hints of a zombie/skeleton workforce, it seems i'm just not there yet. What could make this game better still?: more efficient/fun grinding, maybe a bit longer day/night and i still hope one can make use of an automated source of grind via zombies/skeletons, if they just reduce the grind, without giving fun while doing so, i'm not quiet sure i'm into it.