Graveyard Keeper

A game tailor made for management nuts. The game is often compared to stardew valley, and while it shares the genre, I think that is not an entirely helpful comparison for the player. Like stardew and its influences, you are in the position of managing a graveyard, this is your primary revenue stream. You receive corpses, and have the choice of either butchering it for useful (and illegal) substances and burning the evidence, or giving it a burial and crafting decorations to increase your churches prestige. You also must garden, mine, and dungeon delve to further your skill set and unlock esoteric components needed to further your quest. Unlike stardew, this is a game that revels in optimisation, and technology trees. You must learn its rules and spend hours optimizing your time in order to progress or the game will punish you. This can be enjoyable for a certain kind of person (ie me) but not everyone. There is no character interaction outside of quests, and while they are amusing, this means you have no form of "downtime" everything you do is either industrious or a waste of time, and you will always be two steps away from the thing you need to progress. There is a definite emphasis on management over simulation, more of a manual Factorio than Stardew. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just something to keep in mind. The quest design is quite poor in my opinion. There are quests given early in the game that are uncompletable until you sink in a good 10-15 hours of game play. In retrospect I think this was a hamfisted approach attempt at giving the player direction into late game activities, but, since they are given alongside tutorial style quests it leaves the player confused, believing they are doing something wrong. The dungeon delving aspects are also very poorly done, and just not fun in my experience.

This game started out great, and was fun to explore the different gameplay mechanics required and to see the world you find yourself in. However, you quickly start to see the world is fairly 2 dimensional. NPCs have limited dialogue, some parts of the game are not even included (town) and the quests are all pretty grindy. The game quickly stopped being fun and became a chore to play. No thanks.

I just finished this game and was initially pleased with it. The game starts off strong introducing you to the world and how things operate. After the first 100 days though it begins to increasingly become a slog. This would be a fun game of self discovery as you experiment with different combinations to find answers, but resources are painfully far away or locked behind a once every seven days event. Much of my early game cut me off at the knees because I hadn't lucked into a random event that would give me the blueprints on how to use the grave keeper's key. And why on earth did they make it so you couldn't sell the stuff you made?? I had a cellar full of gold star beer, but turns out you could only sell it at the witch burnings, but by the time I had things set up there, I lost access to the witch burnings so I couldn't sell it anywhere! Or maybe you could, but the game gives you NO information on where items could be sold. You'd might think you could sell equipment from where you bought it, but most the time time you can't. Then just when you start gaining steam thinking you found the lynch pin you were missing to let you REALLY enjoy the game, you get blocked behind, "Thanks for doing this, now wait seven days to be able to do the next thing", a restriction that just bloats out the run time. All in all, your storage ability is too limited, your walking speed too slow, the resources unreasonably far away, resources unreasonably limited, events too far spaced out on days. It's a 15 hour game stretched to 50 hours then informs you that if you want an actual ending to the game you need to go buy the DLCs.

The worst part is at the end - completely unnesesscary GRIND to complete main quest - you have to earn 12gold coins wich is 1200 silver coins. and you can sell your crops for max 55 silver coins per game week (aprox 30min of real time and only if you have highest rated "gold" crops. and you can lift only ONE crate with crops at time! and place where you can create crate of crops and sell them is in like two the opposide sides of map!). WHY IS THAT IN THE GAME?! this is opposite of fun! or why there is no "fast forward" of time? some quests are like "come back in NEXT WEEK" and you have to JUST WAIT until that time pass (drain your energy with sword fencing (simplest way), then go to sleep, then wait and repeat it all MANY MANY MANY MANY MANY TIMES!). and after that you have got instantly ANOTHER "wait till next week" quest!!! THIS IS STUPID!!!

GK grew out of a pretty original idea - the management sim of running the graveyard and related services. Sadly, the first 5 or so hours of the game have all the fun content the devs could manage - as you play further, the rush to release becomes more and more evident. There are unfinished locations, unobtainable items, useless technologies, and so on. You will also increasingly spend less time tending to your church and the graveyard around it - instead, the game shifts to an endless grind of items/crops to obtain the vast amounts of gold you need to finish the game (the church and the graveyard at this point give pitiful payout). Many features, such as fishing and farming, were obviously "tacked on" last minute to appeal to the Stardew Valley hype - they don't work well and don't feel like they belong in this game. From the devs previous title, Punch Club, and the first few hours, it feels that they really like their games and put the effort in development - in this case, it simply feels that the devs rushed to release. Perhaps they needed the cash flow to keep working, or perhaps it was some sort of deal with Microsoft (the game is on Xbox Game Pass). If this stayed in development for 6-12 months more, it could have been a wonderful game. Will they ever fix it? Will there be additional content to tie all the loose ends? Not sure.