Graveyard Keeper

The game starts of fine with the usual exploration of available areas and conversations with various NPCs. You pick up a handful of quests or more almost immediately. However, it quickly stales out, and I find myself struggling to finish it after 30 hours due to boredom. There just isn't enough interesting things to do. Crops tend themselves. Your graveyard tends itself. Crafting the necessary components for various things is a chore more than a challenge. If you've played Stardew Valley, then imagine it without having to care for your crops, without social development or interesting dialogue with *any* NPC, and without the dungeon to take away the monotonus tedium of every day. That's largely the gameplay. There's just nobody to talk to. Nothing interesting to discover. Nothing fun to do.

I spent an entire week straight to play through this game, so I might as well leave a little review. Version 1.022 - 1.027, Linux, 540 ingame days, Carrot Martini. The game was released in what I consider a beta state. Gamepad (XBox 360 wired) doesn't work, live streaming appears to be not implemented. The devs put out a patch every day to fix the most severe issues. There are tons of minor bugs, but I only had a single crash. The game is often compared to Stardew Valley (SV) but in every respect that these games have in common Graveyard Keeper is worse. The most severe issues are with the UI, but there are too many to detail them all. Gardening is cumbersome and so is item management. Fishing has another system tacked on but is buggy and less fun than in SV. A lot of systems in the game are poorly or not at all explained. The writing is poor and the story not interesting. There are far fewer and less interesting character interactions than in SV. The quests are all simple fetch/craft quests but it is often unclear what to do. The dialogues in my versions were clearly not proof read (English). A plus side for some is the tech tree, but there are a number of dependencies that you can't see there. Together with the story tree it gives the game more structure compared to SV, which you may or may not like. In general the game seems to be designed such that most tasks take far longer than they should. The end game is so grindy that I doubt many people will finish this game.

The game had a rough start but after Breaking Dead DLC this game is so much more fun to play.

Lacks a lot of interesting decisions and feels like a grind fest. Whilsts the theme is a bit over the top, it is not enough to hide the fact that the end-to-end game is not fleshed out enough.

Good game, like all Lazy Bear Games games, but, like all Lazy Bear Games game it's incredibly grind heavy. If I didn't know any better I'd say the devs are former arcade game devs that never got over arcades no longer being a thing any more. The game has a nice, easy to grasp idea and at first glance you'll realise how entertaining it is. Then you find yourself 20 hours in and with barely any progress and begin to wonder if you're doing anything wrong. You're not. The game is designed with grinding in mind. Other games do this as well, yet, somehow they succeed where Lazy Bear Games keeps on failing. Worse off is probably the fact that the game dangles an entire section before your for the entire course of the game only for you to actually finish the game and realise that the Town section was never completed so it's not in the game. Again, the game isn't bad, it's just that you'll probably get your fill of the game a dozen or more hours before you hit the end. You might return to the game and try plying it again. You will once more enjoy your time with the game and you once more will find your enjoyment wane far sooner then the devs intended. Don't get me wrong, it's not the fist game to do this. Darkest Dungeon comes to mind doing something similar. You just need to know that if you start this game, you will find it funny, and nice, and entertaining but you are unlikely to ever actually finish is - not unless you are a completionist that will grow to resent the game by the end or are really, really into the game - which, again, is a possibility.