Graveyard Keeper

I'm a bit disappointed because, at first glance, the game seems really fun and interesting. However, after a while, you start to notice that some mechanics lack coherence — alchemy, for instance, is nearly impossible to tackle without the wiki. While early progression is rewarding, it gradually loses impact as the story introduces a constant stream of new tasks, making your previous efforts feel somewhat redundant. The map layout is also frustrating, even after unlocking shortcuts. Navigating the world feels like an unnecessary chore... Overall, the game would benefit from a better story, more thoughtfully designed mechanics, and a more meaningful sense of late-game progression.

I am utterly obsessed with what this game promises to be. I love necromancy, I like the idea of taking immoral shortcuts to make a living, I love the idea of TENDING A GRAVEYARD. But you don't really do that. You grow carrots, chop trees, mine stones, dig sand, gather clay, process all these materials into planks and glass and nails and wedges and write books and wait for Sunday so you can do a prayer service so you can use the faith to research items so you can unlock more ways to refine your stone or make wine, etc. etc. Anything and everything to avoid the titular graveyard. The entire mechanic is: there are good corpses and bad corpses. The bad corpses make your graveyard look like crap so it will earn less money from church-goers. To rectify this there are various surgeries you can do on the corpses that will either give you good resources, improve the body, or make the body worse. (Dumping it in a river like in the trailer only happens once. After that it's much more beneficial to cremate bad bodies legally.) Decorate bodies with tombstones of various materials you've been processing, and boom done, you did it. Meanwhile every quest will ask you to grow grapes to make wine or to make oil to mix with ash to make black paint to make ink to combine with paper that you made and a feather that you bought all to make 10 flyers and I just *don't care* And all the dead of night corpse defiling has zero consequence so it loses all of its punch very quickly. You end up making a broad daylight logging camp of zombies and no one bats an eye. No one reacts to anything actually. They just stand there waiting for you to do their quest. So the dead are just another boring resource And the map is way too big. So much time spent walking, even with the band-aid teleport stone you can buy very early game. Not that you'll know how good it is because nothing has tooltips. So good luck figuring out how expensive something is going to be before you unlock it. (use the wiki)

I get it, the devs here wanted to give the "where the hell am I" vibe, and that is definitely the mood of the game. But boy is it UNPLAYABLE without a wiki. Sure, you can smash your head into every corner of the game until you figure out how to do the most trivial task, or you can just google it and find out how it's done, and it's always in the most unintuitive way possible. I'm not all in for handholding, but the fact that an external source is almost mandatory should be stated on the store page.

I have only played the game few hours, now. It is quite engaging and there are also some fun moments. Besides the fun it has this social-critical undertone of anti-turbo-capitalism ("Where does that meat come from?"). I like the game. There is one big "but", though, which is the awfully slow performance on Linux. I haven't tried Windows, yet, but the forums are full with complaints. I have a 4 core CPU with Nvidia RTX 3050 it's basically unplayeable with high resolution and gets a pain with weather changes. I only read that the problem is basically unsolvable, because it is because of Unity, and also that the devs don't care for years.

fun stardew-like sim with good humor