Title: Graveyard Keeper
Published: Aug. 15, 2018
Developer: Lazy Bear Games
Why I Chose It: This game has been billed as similar to Stardew Valley, which is one of my favorite video games ever. Add in the fact that it’s all about managing a graveyard, and I was 100% sold and ready to go. A gothic farming simulator? I was ready to roll the day it released.
The premise:
Build and manage a medieval graveyard while facing ethical dilemmas and making questionable decisions. Welcome to Graveyard Keeper, the most inaccurate medieval cemetery sim of the year.
Spoilers Below.
Discussion:
Every part of this game reminds me of Stardew Valley, but not always in a good way. You begin the game in a strange new world where you are appointed Graveyard Keeper and given control over the Village cemetery. You learn how to take care of the bodies a cranky donkey brings to you.
When you start out the game, the wise-cracking donkey calls you comrade and wants to rise up in rebellion but soon settles for carrots and then never speaks again. This matches the rest of the humor in the game, which starts off strong but after you’ve completed the first few quests, it fades away to nothing.
Your role quickly expands from managing a graveyard to becoming the preacher at the church, helping the Inquisitor hunt down witches, creating a cult sacrifical altar, finding a missing father, and more. The responsibilities grow quickly and there’s always something to do as you manage all these requests and your energy levels.
Soon you unlock a dungeon to explore where you must gather a bucket of blood for a very sketchy man named Snake. The dungeon is one of my favorite parts of the game; combat is entertaining, and the enemies are interesting as you learn about their movements and attack patterns.
While many of the enemies follow similar attack patterns, I love how you can use the environment to better block them. Hide behind barrels while the ghouls charge you or duck around corners when the bats fly in. Since every swing of the sword costs energy you have to be careful and strategic with every move.
While there is a lot to love about the game – the interesting concept of graveyard management, the crafting system – it is heavily flawed. Every single system is so overly complicated. For each process you have to complete 7 other steps, and it’s unclear how these systems work or what connects them. As an example, to be able to upgrade the sermons you can perform at your church which is your main source of money at the start of the game, you first have to unlock several abilities.
For sermons alone you have to unlock the writing skill branch and the alchemy skill branch. Then you have to build a desk which requires upgrading your wood skills, and your iron skills; both of those require unlocking the ability to build a furnace, a workbench, and a saw. Every process takes unlocking 4-5 other branches to do anything, and the experience points to unlock them are slow to gain. It’s also not made clear in the game what you need to do, so I spend a lot of time searching for answers on the internet.
As far as the ‘questionable choices’ are concerned, you’re given the option to harvest body parts for profit. You can get a fake royal seal to sell meat harvested from corpses. You also can harvest fat, blood, bones, organs and skin all for your own use. These choices are glossed over fairly quickly in the game because there is no real consequence to them and no way to progress the game without making them. You have to use skin to make paper to make sermons to make money. You need a large number of skulls to complete a quest to progress the game so these choices aren’t really an option so much as a demand. There are no repercussions for selling corpse meat or butchering corpses and throwing them in the river. It really doesn’t impact anything at all and is more a part of the game that is essentially unavoidable than anything the player can choose to do or not do.
In Conclusion: I plan to play through to completion, but only because I so badly want to love this spooky game. It’s frustrating and requires a lot of help from internet guides. At the end of the day, download Stardew Valley if you’re looking for a fun resource management game with personality and charm.
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