Graveyard Keeper is a beautifully bizarre blend of dark humor and soul-soothing gameplay. While you're technically managing corpses and running a graveyard, the game delivers a surprisingly peaceful experience thanks to its calming music, cozy pixel art, and slow-paced, thoughtful progression.
There's something deeply satisfying about bringing order to chaos — organizing graves, restoring a crumbling church, and crafting in your own little medieval bubble. It’s almost meditative, helping you quietly sort through not just tasks, but your own thoughts.
If you're looking for a game that balances quirky fun with genuine tranquility, Graveyard Keeper is a perfect place to lose yourself — and maybe find a little peace, too.
Buggy and poor crafting/vending experiences.
I've spent 86 hours on this game and just discovered that if you upgrade all your crafting equipment/tools to their highest levels you will miss out on some quest items. For example if you save your money for an excellent fishing rod (the highest tiered item) and not buy the cheaper 'good' rod you can't catch certain fish. Shouldn't the highest level upgrade item/tool be able to do/catch all the below category ?
Another example, you get/have to craft potions in this game on an Alchemy table. If you upgrade your table to the highest level (level 2) you cannot craft the same potions as a level one Alchemy table.
Frustrating.
NPCs are pretty buggy. Occasionally certain characters wouldn't appear at their appointed time/places unless I restarted the game. Also storyline continuity gets broken. My character will ask a vendor (say in chapter 2) for an item that I won't discover I need unit I talk to a different character (in chapter 4).
Not sure if it's worth finishing the game.
I personally found this game to be a real treat to play and VERY easy to get sucked into. I didn't find the "grind" later in the game to be that bad. The job does a great job of helping you progress in a natural way.
Here's how it usually goes: NPC "A" gives you a quest to find/make an item. NPC "B" also gives you a quest to find/make a separate item. Finally, NPC "C" comes along that helps you get the item "A" wants which then leads to you finishing "B"s quest. It keeps going like this for the whole game.
The game also pushes you to automate certain tasks which I think is why some maybe view it as a grind, since the game expects you to slowly move into more and more automation.
Overall I love it and I highly recommend it.
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)
Think of one of those bad MMORPG characters, he ones newbies used to make: a guy who does alchemy potions, then becomes a miner, then a blacksmith, carpernter, cook...well, Graveyard Keepr expects you to become this persona, but in a very amusing manner.
You've got always something to do. In fact, there's just so much tasks that require your attention and/or intervention that you'll most likely be selecting what you want to deal with first, as opposed to some games where you roam around aimlessly trying to figure out what specific thing you need to do to keep moving forward.
Early reviews of this game made me wary of buying it a couple of times, because the premises interested me a lot, but I was afraid of getting a broken game with a cool idea behind it. Well, I'm glad I did: I'm just over 50 hours into this fame, and still I extend my playing sessions for a couple of hours just to finish this thing...and then that other thing that just opened up...and, oh, right, today is that day where that guy shows up on the tavern and so on.
Is it awesome? Yes, love the game's sense of (dark) humor, most tasks you need to do (some are corny though) and the varied assortment of skills you can develop. is it perfect? Hell, no: the incessant amount of walking you need to do, ugh...sometimes it feels silly to go across the village three times in a roll just to deliver some dude's reply to some other character. And the energy mechanic really pisses me off at times, because it forces you to sleep or just eat something when you just want to finish the bucnh of crafting you need in order to do something, and it really gets in the way. I know that without it some systems could be abused, but I would welcome a different manner of energy spenditure whenever the char is not in danger.
Would have given a 4.5 rating if it was available.
TL;DR: Awesome sense of dark humour, lots and lots of things to do (tasks and new skills), lots of grind and walking...but you should buyt it!
