Graveyard Keeper had the potential to be this year’s simulation RPG darling, similar to games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley. It has the art style, quirky humor, and grinding gameplay. Unfortunately between some insane grinding and some tedious upkeep, the game feels more like a chore.
The premise behind the game is that you’re a person in the modern world that gets in an accident, and your consciousness gets sent back to medieval times. You inherit the body of the Graveyard Keeper of a village, and you need to find your way back home. A talking skull points you in the direction of a few townspeople that may be able to help you out. But this is where Graveyard Keeper hits its first snag. It is hard to keep track of what you’re supposed to be doing in the game, on top of your day to day routine, and it feels overwhelming. In other games in the genre, I usually have a good idea of what I need or want to do going into the next day. But I never felt this way with Graveyard Keeper. It feels like you have to do so much that it makes it overwhelming.
In addition to that, each activity takes stamina, which is fine. But there never seems to be any relief. Some days I just spent my time cutting down a handful of trees, and then that was it. You can cook food, which restores energy. But cooking food also requires energy! So if you’re out of energy and you don’t have any food stored away, looks like you’re taking a nap. I think my biggest gripe with the game is how I feel rushed most of the time. It never feels like I have enough time in the day to do what I want to do, and then it keeps pushing other things I want to do back. I found the most success if I focused on a task for a handful of days, but then it starts to feel like I’m really working instead of enjoying a video game.
Playing this game made me realize that there is a huge opportunity for a game mechanic where you can stack things that you want to do. For example, when you gain access to the cellar under your house, you have some debris that you need to clear. This debris takes some mid-level skills to produce the necessary items to remove the junk. It would be nice to look at the debris and hit a button, and it adds it to a list of things you want to accomplish. I think a mechanic like that would help me feel less overwhelmed in the game, and also would help me to remember the things I set out to do that day.
The main mechanic behind the game is maintaining a Graveyard and church. In the early stages of the game, a talking donkey will deliver a fresh corpse outside of your morgue a few times a week. After receiving the body, you can harvest organs from it, and then you can bury it or burn it. Burying the body in the graveyard affects the quality of the graveyard, and certain people in town like to see the graveyard be of high quality. To do so, you need to add headstones and grave fences. Each grave you dig has a rating based on the quality of body buried there, plus the quality of the grave accessories. In the early stages of the game, just getting in the single digits in terms of quality takes quite a bit of time and work.
After you maintain the graveyard for a while, you’re given full control of the church, and this is really when the game starts to take a turn into tedium. Once a week, you can perform a sermon at your church, which in turn nets you faith, which is a second type of currency in the game. Faith can be used to study items at a study table, and you can also write different sermons. But the pricing for all items is so insane that it takes forever to make any progress. Plus you can only preach once a week, and in the early stages of your church, you barely gain any faith. On top of that, you have to maintain your farm, your stock of wood and stone, mine for minerals, and you really start to feel overwhelmed.
I really wanted to like this game; it’s meant for me to love. There are just a few changes to the game that would make it so much more enjoyable. The first I can think of is having townspeople help you out with some chores after you’ve established yourself, like managing resources. In the early stages of the game, it makes sense for me to chop my own wood. But after you start to become a prominent member of this town, maybe someone else could help keep the wood stocked. While I get that a trait of the genre is managing multiple aspects of your life, it is way too much in this game. I think a perfect way to introduce this is as your church gains followers, members of the church would volunteer time to keep it operational.
I also think they really need to balance the cost of producing some items. For example, you can set up a beehive in the game, and then you can produce honey. But to do so, you need to collect 20 honeybees to build your hive. To collect bees, you have to interact with a bee’s nest, and you might catch a bee when you interact with it. You may also just get some beeswax or some honey. It’s always random! Oh, and when you interact with a beehive, you lose health.
Feeling overwhelmed yet? Well don’t worry, there is more! On top of all of this, there is a dungeon crawling aspect to the game. I haven’t explored this much yet because I would like to get some form of armor, but it takes a ton of resources to craft. Plus the combat in the game is pretty bad, and swinging your sword takes so much energy that you feel kind of hopeless in the dungeons.
Another aspect of Graveyard Keeper that keeps it from standing out in the genre is lack of interesting characters. One of my favorite things from Stardew Valley was getting to know the characters and having unique interactions with them throughout the year. I don’t get this feeling in Graveyard Keeper. A part of that is the mix between the fantasy and simulation elements. While other games in the genre do the same, it doesn’t feel as forced as it does in Graveyard Keeper, especially when you’re talking to a donkey or a detached skull. The abundance of fantastical elements gives the game a lighthearted appearance, but the hardcore simulation core clashes with the presentation
While my time with the game has not been the best, there are some redeeming aspects of the game. I think the pixel art in Graveyard Keeper is fantastic. There are little details everywhere that brings you into the world, and the map is massive with different areas to explore. It can be a bit easy to get lost, especially if you’re looking for specific supplies. You kind of have to just wander around until you stumble upon the different merchants. It can be frustrating when you’re looking for specific supplies to complete a project, and it ends up taking a lot longer than you anticipated.
While the game looks great, there are some weird performance issues. The game stutters quite frequently on my PC, and running the game at my computer’s native resolution does not work properly. The world doesn’t get fully drawn, so you’ll see black spots on the screen where items haven’t been loaded into memory yet. It makes it very distracting to walk around the world and see parts of the ground, or a tree, just pop up. Running the game at a lower resolution fixed this issue, but I still found it weird happening in a game that shouldn’t require too much hardware to run.
Overall I would only recommend the game to people who do not mind insane grinding to make progress in simulation RPGs. While I enjoyed a few aspects of the game, and enjoyed the presentation, it is hard to recommend to everyone. I found the lack of a traditional journal, plus tedious gameplay made my time with the game frustrating and repetitive. The developers have been releasing frequent updates, but I’ve yet to see one address any of my issues. I would recommend either waiting for a deep sale, or seeing if the game addresses any frustrations before buying it.
Score: 2/5
Graveyard Keeper was released on August 15, 2018 for PC and Xbox One. A copy of the PC version was supplied by the publisher to the reviewer.
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