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.
Viscerafest wears its Doom inspiration on its sleeve, from the weapon UI to the sprite-based enemies and environmental objects, while pursuing its own balls-hard slant on the combat -- and this is where it stumbles right off a cliff for me. The character, setting, music? They're fine. The manual limited checkpointing system is pretty clever. The level design, taken in a vacuum, is... alright. But the only way to survive in this game is by bunnyhopping around fast enough to avoid enemy projectiles, in extremely boxy and rather closed-in levels that don't really allow you the room to do this properly, while affording you an utter pittance of ammo and thereby expecting you to maintain pinpoint accuracy and punch the smaller enemies whenever possible. While trying to bunnyhop through claustrophobic levels and your targets are single-facing 2D sprites in a 3D environment. I don't think I should need to explain further why this comes together as a horrible clashing of elements. There is method to the madness, but it doesn't feel like I'm learning anything, adapting, or getting better. I'm just throwing myself into the meat grinder however many consecutive times it takes until just enough of the enemy shots happen to go wide that I don't die. Go look up some free Doom mods! There are probably plenty you haven't played yet that are a better time than this.
I'd buy Aladdin for $6 -- you know, the price point GOG traditionally had for the really old retro releases. No more than that. Honestly wouldn't bother with Lion King. This? This is parodic. And how does it need 2 GB to install?!
