Graveyard Keeper

Awesome game, but extremely grindy. Barely brought myself to finish it from the second try. To this day, I simultaneously yearn for and dread to find another game like this.

Don't let the 52 hour playtime fool you, I broke my ankle and was desperate for distraction. This game has a ton of great ideas, and some good pixel art, but the implementation is atrocious. Every little interaction has some obnoxious layer to it. It's death by a thousand annoyances. Too many to bother listing. I can't believe I just played all the way through this.

This is Stardew Valley if it was dark and creepy. The player character is new in town and has to fix up the area in the name of one goal - help a talking skull to lift his amnesia so he remembers how to send you back to the future! This game is full of quirky characters, delightfully spooky music and general creepy vibes. The friendship system doesn’t have a decay feature, so you’ll never lose your progress if you don’t finish a quest. Similarly, the progression system looks daunting at first, but is revealed slowly, so you never feel lost, and the game does a good job of opening up over time so you’re not just instantly bombarded with things. The one advice I will give anyone is complete the base game before you buy the DLC. I did not and I became very lost as to which quests belong to which pack and I regret not knowing sooner because now my game won’t load if I uninstall the DLC in the name of less overwhelm. You have been warned. Overall, this game is wonderfu...

Honestly, this game has been in my wishlist for a while, I was so happy to nab it when it was on sale (even bought the dlc). However, this game kinda blows. It's so beautiful visually and I really enjoy the unique mechanisms and building but the game itself provides no guidance whatsoever. You have to be glued to your phone to figure out how to do a large majority of stuff. You're stuck in a time constriction so in order to do things successfully you have to make sure you're doing them on the right day in the right order but the game provides no information on what to do first. Which will have you waiting an entire in-game week to do one thing only for it to let you start another. What started as a fun farming sim quickly became very frustrating and unenjoyable.

I wanted to enjoy this game but it has some pretty insurmountable flaws to me 1. The pacing is bad. The game basically starts you off by meeting 50 npcs each with their own quests and availability cycles. You end up unlocking a bunch of stuff really quickly in the early game so it overwhelms the player quickly. 2. The ENERGY system is frustrating and adds nothing of value. Compared to a game like stardew valley where energy is a resource but you can still get things done during the day in GYK you wake up, craft 4 gravestones with stones you already have in your inventory and you're out of energy again. 3. Additionally the day/night cycle and energy system are meaningless. You can sleep to regain energy, or you can just eat infinite amounts of food. Occasionally the game will tell you that you need to sleep but its not like stardew where you need to be back in bed by 2am every day regardless so why even have it there in the first place? 4. walking around is tedious. First off the map...

"That time a hipster got isekai'd and made into a graveyard keeper" This game has all the usual tropes of a cosy farming sim with a few extra bells and whistles. After a brief encounter with Truck-kun, you meet god and get transported into a magical world called... probably World if the naming convention for other stuff holds. You proceed to dig up the tutorial fairy - a talking skull named Gerry. Gerry is not a very good tutorial fairy, on account of amnesia and alcoholism, but he successfully guides you through the process of stripping meat off of a fresh cadaver to be later sold in the town tavern. So, off to the tavern we go. And off in the tavern we get told that, because someone has been selling "inappropriate" meat, we need a royal stamp to actually sell it. Thankfully, the barkeep helpfully points out a rogue who can get us a completely legitimate stamp to sell our completely legitimate meat. Unfortunately, said rogue will not give it to us until we get up to 4/10 hearts int...

Stardew Valley like with one major improvement: No one forces you to sleep. Actually chill little game with no real time pressures.

After finally 100%ing this thing, I have to weigh in. This is a vaguely comedic Stardew Valley inspired craft em up where you are some guy that gets Isekai'd and sent to another world after a supernatural disaster. You are placed there as the Graveyard Keeper, who maintains an Ancient Contract that the village values. You also learn that the donkey bringing you bodies is a communist; who proudly displays the "nobody knows what communism actually is" meme as their entire character (yes the donkey talks) While the game is called Graveyard keeper, and keeping the graveyard is a mechanic, you spend maybe 1% of your time actually doing that. In fact the majority of the game is expanding your crafting so that you can do the 100+ fetch quests in the game. Every single character has a long storyline that gets even longer with all of the DLC, and every quest is some variation of "Bring me this thing to continue the plot" which eventually gives you the mcguffins you need to get home. The...

Very fun and addicting gameplay loop, but lacking in QOL features. It really feels like the developer didn't play their own game, or they just love to inconvenience themselves. Would recommend this game with a few QOL mods installed.

The art is fantastic, the game has several unique spins on a farm sim/task management game, but oh. my. god. The time you spend walking is insane! And there's no in game way to improve it. Also very little way to track what you're doing. I don't need to be handheld but there isn't even a quest tab?? NPCs are only available once per week?? The fact that this game has been out for 7 years and they haven't fixed these very basic problems is atrocious. I genuinely thought this was in EA because of how many basic functions it lacks that would improve the game so much. I bought it for 90% off and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for that price, save your money and buy a game that the developers care about.