Graveyard Keeper
Graveyard Keeper is the most inaccurate medieval cemetery management sim of all time. Build and manage your own graveyard, and expand into other ventures, while finding shortcuts to cut costs. Use all the resources you can find. After all, this is a game about the spirit of capitalism, and doing whatever it takes to build a thriving business. And it’s also a love story. Face ethical dilemmas. Do you really want to spend money on that proper burger meat for the witch-burning festival, when you have so many resources lying around? Gather valuable materials and craft new items. Expand your Graveyard into a thriving business. Help yourself — gather the valuable resources scattered across the surrounding areas, and explore what this land has to offer. Quests and corpses. These dead bodies don’t need all those organs, do they? Why not grind them up and sell them to the local butcher? Or you can go on proper quests, you roleplayer. Explore mysterious dungeons. No medieval game would be complete without those! Take a trip into the unknown, and find discover new alchemy ingredients — which may or may not poison a whole bunch of nearby villagers.
Graveyard Keeper Review
Detailed pixel graphics, a town from yesteryear that uses resources such as axes, shovels, and hammers to farm and build; time-consuming activities that require much patience and material to complete, a collection of people to talk to and trade with, and even some minor combat activities are all things these two games share with one another. While this all seems pretty standard for simulation games (save the detailed pixel graphics), it’s the certain time and place, especially considering Stardew Valley‘s popularity, that makes Graveyard Keeper seem like a work inspired by a perceived greatness. The 3D platformers that came upon the heels of Super Mario 64, though that isn’t an indication of how great I think Stardew Valley is or how forgettable I think Graveyard Keeper is. The comparison is just one I think should be taken into consideration for those wanting to discredit the game for being too similar.
Graveyard Keeper requires patience. True to its management roots, the game isn’t shy about overwhelming players early on. Following a short tutorial, you’re left to your own devices. Striking a balance during the game’s opening hours is difficult — the bodies keep coming. It’s easy enough to inter a corpse, but maintaining a graveyard’s a different beast entirely.
From the game’s outset, players need to build workstations to craft recipes and tools. There are dozens of different stations, including furnaces, woodworking stands, and anvils. Each one produces different items and objects. Wooden crosses, for example, require a woodworking bench and stacks of lumber cut at a sawhorse. The seemingly straightforward process of building, say, a grip of iron nails is a multi-stepped endeavor. Graveyard Keeper‘s crafting system is granular and deceptively complex. But while that may appeal to a niche management sim-loving audience, those looking for a dark spin on the Harvest Moon formula might find themselves drowning under a deluge of upgrade charts and missing components.
Ironically, not only are Graveyard Keeper‘s different systems tiring to think about, but they’re also taxing on your avatar. Every action you do — from digging a hole for a corpse to sharpening your ax — zaps energy. Like laboring at a demanding job in real life, it always feels as though the Keeper is fighting a losing battle. There’s rarely enough time to accomplish the litany of tasks needed to progress in a single day. And while eating food helps recover some energy, many activities require a disproportionate amount of energy to tackle. Sleeping is the only surefire way to restore all of your stamina in one fell swoop, but it’s not uncommon to get exhausted a few hours after waking up. Graveyard Keepers have terrible hours, it seems.
To compare Graveyard Keeper to Stardew Valley is to reveal where it comes up short. I missed the human warmth, the addictive structure to each day and most of all, being able to do whatever I wanted to. Graveyard Keeper never holds your hand, but it never lets go of it either, since everything you want to do is, at least for the 30 hours I’ve spent with it, linked to something you need to do first.