The comparisons to Stardew Valley are inevitable. I really like both, but for different reasons. Still, since I imagine most people who're considering this have already played Stardew, that'll be a good frame of reference. Where Stardew is very zen, Graveyard Keeper keeps you much busier. There is still an energy meter, but I find it much easier to fill. You can sleep whenever you want, and only for as long as you need to fill it up (or less, even). The day/night cycle exists and affects what's going on, but I've yet to come to a point of being forced to sleep. Crafting is also a much bigger part of GK, and I'm cranking out bread and other foods which give a good return on energy. Gathering has been much easier as well. Stardew, to me, involves a lot of just waiting for things to happen. It's fun, but at least in the early game you get into a routine. In GK I feel like I have 800 things going on, but in a good way. I haven't encountered any deadlines yet, instead it's "oh yeah, I wanted to do that" or "maybe I'll try this today today instead." The NPCs are well-written enough, although building relationships doesn't seem to be a core mechanic like it was in Stardew. I also haven't found the learning curve to be particularly steep. Money barely matters, since you can build basically everything yourself (or at least I haven't hit anything I couldn't in my few hours so far), and you don't need money for new crops (or bodies in this case). I've gotten some cash from burials, but have only needed to buy some beer for a quest and I just grabbed an iron ingot since I haven't farmed the mats to make my own furnace yet. But this was convenience rather than necessity, and the ingot was 80 copper out of my 5 silver. You also get research points by doing the stuff you'd be doing anyway: crafting, gathering, which lets you unlock new skills or buildings. And remember: if you don't want to bury someone or you run out of space, there is a river nearby....
The game grabbed me at first; I really enjoyed the atmosphere and aesthetic, and found the environments to be really well done and the overall mood to be excellent. This is good, because you will be seeing these same scenes a *lot*. Even when you do the puzzles right there's a tremendous amount of back-and-forth, with the game making you go through two or three screens after doing one piece of a puzzle so you can complete the next. At first it was okay, as the first puzzle I found satisfying overall. Where this becomes a problem is when the game moves away from puzzles into more action and platforming. The hit detection is lousy: I've died numerous times because something was able to grab me even though I wasn't within actual touching distance. Or another example: sometimes you can't move from one ladder to another right next to it (even if your whole body is level with it), simply because the game doesn't register it. The action itself has generally involved being chased (where the poor hit detection on ledges and ladders becomes a huge pain) or mindlessly shooting things that come at you in a straight line. But where I truly lost patience was with the horrible checkpoint system. The Way breaks every basic rule of where to put checkpoints. Puzzle at the bottom of 3 sets of stairs that take 1-2 minutes to go down? Let's put the checkpoint back at the top. Jumping puzzle immediately after timing puzzle? Checkpoint goes at the beginning of the former, so you get to redo the first puzzle every time you mess up on the second. And let's not forget the time where there was a chase sequence, but the checkpoint was such that I had to climb down a ladder and then watch an unskippable cutscene every. single. time. The reference to games like Flashback or Another World is appropriate. Good aesthetic, extremely frustrating gameplay. There's a reason newer games don't do this stuff: it's simply not fun. At this point the story just isn't worth it anymore.
