I want to love Graveyard Keeper. I do love chore simulator type games - I’ve put so many hours into Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing and there’s no telling how many big holes I’ve dug in Minecraft just to relax. Graveyard Keeper could be (superficially) described as “occult Stardew Valley”, which should be right up my alley, but it ended up being a bit much for me.
I’ve been checking up on Graveyard Keeper since before it came out, and I’ve held off because of mixed reviews. The consensus seems to be that the grind is just too much, and unfortunately that’s pretty much correct, but I want to get more specific because if it was just mindless grind I don’t think I’d have as much of a problem with it. The issue is that the game throws you into the deep end with no life preserver basically immediately. The entire tech tree is open for you to peruse and you can explore a lot of the map right out of the gate, but you don’t have any tech points and no concept of how big the map is or what’s in it. The really annoying thing is that the game is not good at telegraphing what decisions are going to be useful to you. You can grind up a ton of red points to unlock the marble-carving tech really early (because I dunno you want nice headstones in your graveyard), but there’s no guarantee that you can actually use it for anything without, say, having completed a certain quest to get access to a certain map area. I feel like usually in a game like this if you put in the time to unlock some late-game thing early, you get rewarded with something useful, but that’s not guaranteed to happen here and you might have spent a lot of time unlocking something you can’t even use immediately.
I started playing by saving up my points and crafting materials until I knew there was something I needed to unlock/build to satisfy a quest objective, to try and avoid wasting my hard-earned EXP. But even then, it’s not always clear what quests will give you useful rewards, or how much of a time sink they’re going to be. I spent hours grinding crops and other materials to take care of the refugee camp found in one of the DLCs, and while that did net me a ton of money, I realized later that I could have been doing the way, way easier quest for the bishop instead, which would have given me a more consistent income and opened up research and crafting opportunities and progressed the game.
Furthermore, the time system is really punishing. Time marches continuously onwards and there’s no “bed time”, although sleeping does save/heal/advance the clock. So if you do a lot of tasks and deplete your energy bar early, you can go to sleep at 10AM and wake up at 8PM or something, skipping most of the day. This becomes an issue because most NPCs are only out during business hours and on top of that, the most important NPCs (and a few entire game mechanics) are only available on certain days of the week. The day of the week is tracked by a calendar that displays the days symbolically and you aren’t otherwise notified of the day of the week. This all adds a layer of mental overhead because you have to first remember the schedules of all the NPCs you need to talk to in a week AND be continuously watching the calendar to keep track of time while you do other tasks. This is on top of budgeting time to walk the several game-hours across the map to actually do the time-sensitive stuff. Forgetting something date-specific and having to wait a whole extra game-week to do it is infuriating. This all affects the pace of the game so much that any comparison to Stardew Valley breaks down. Another difference is that Graveyard Keeper is a lot more goal-oriented. You aren’t just trying to maintain and improve your graveyard, you’re trying to find a way back to reality (you get isekai’d in the prologue), and everything is a means to that end. Because of this, there isn’t as much of an option to just sit back and chill because there are always tasks to complete and the donkey continuously brings you corpses to bury.
This all being said, I did spend a lot of time with Graveyard Keeper over the holidays, and I had fun overall. I LOVE the art style and the tongue-in-cheek writing. The plot revolves around you trying to return to the real world after waking up in RPG Land as a graveyard keeper. The game is very conscious of the silliness of that, as the former office-worker protagonist interacts with the most tropey stock fantasy characters imaginable. It’s like the bit in Over the Garden Wall where they’re at the tavern and every other patron is just called by their job title.
It did scratch my chore-simulator itch, but I definitely hit a point where it was all just too much to process and I had to put it down. It might just be the case that I just haven’t bootstrapped enough game knowledge to be good at it, maybe once I understand the techs and the quests and stuff enough to prioritize better I’ll enjoy myself more. I can see Graveyard Keeper becoming a favorite if I ever make it to that point.
PS: If you buy this on Switch, know that playing docked is a no-go because the UI is so small. At least I couldn’t figure out how to make it bigger. Handheld is great, though.
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