Described as a morbid Stardew Valley, Graveyard Keeper had a lot to it and offered many many hours of content. I usually don't go for these sandbox style crafting games where the content lies in the inconvenience—to complete one task you must first do several prerequisites, rinse and repeat where nothing is ever straightforward. It's the grind that loses me, and this definitely had slog, but it was charming with its humour, and more importantly it was addictive.

The skill trees provided a lot, the customisation options pretty fun when it came to the graveyard and chapel. Several townsfolk offered questlines, yet were only available on a specific day—seven characters for seven days—and I found I often missed that window and had to wait. Still, I put a lot of work into this game, so it did something right.

Я натурально залип в этой игре. Здесь присутствует система, хз как ее назвать, но ее суть, что для взаимодействия с некоторыми нпс, ты должен ждать определенного дня, и вот такое распределение на разные дни заставляет тебя планировать и подготавливаться к этому дню, также здесь очень много других активностей, и я буквально не мог остановится, потому что ну все надо сделать до того самого определённого дня, иначе придется ждать.
Судя по тому как я это описал, звучит как некий кал, но я наоборот очень кайфанул от данного геймдизайнерского решения, так скажем.
Также музыка очень нравится.

The beginning is definitely fun; lots to build and explore! But I've restarted this game a few times now to try and actually get through it because I hate leaving things unfinished but I think that's exactly where this will go. The quest requirements are unclear, the distances between important places is too great (welcome to the walking simulator), and having to wait for the right time to get things done gets tedious plus the weekdays take too long to get used to due to them being little symbols that can look alike. Unfortunate since it has a lot of potential story-wise.

So the concept of this game is great, you take care of the local graveyard. Pixelart looks stunning and the gameplay loop seems promising. But only after a few hours, you realize how grindy and tedious this game is. Of course, grind can be fun for some time, you can relax and click something to progress the story, but here it's like 95% grinding the same things and maybe 5% doing something new or fun. I tried to play even with cheat engine to speed some things up, but still, I was mostly frustrated by this game.

yeah i didn't like this. i played the version with all the dlc included, and i wonder if the base game is more focused/less overwhelming. as it is, there was just too much stuff - too many mechanics, too many skill trees, too many questlines. it's like having a bunch of push notifications shoved in your face. it feels good to make the numbers go up but that's all it really is.

for a game that is nominally "about the spirit of capitalism" it kind of has nothing to say about capitalism; it just recreates capitalist incentive structures.

Played this for 8 hours and even now I feel a certain compulsion to go back for more, to unlock a bit more research or build the next thing... but I've never had any fun with the damn thing. It's all RPG Progression loops on top of ultimately bland activities. Walk here and hold X for 5 seconds to chop. Walk here and hold X to build. Walk for 5 minutes to find an NPC who'll ask you to walk to the other side of the map and hold X to get some moths. It's Stardew without a satisfying core loop or a division between short and longterm goals.

There's a bizarre lack of signposting where vital skills are completely locked behind talking to a faceless NPC somewhere, and in the meantime your gormless protagonist can hold an shovel in his hand in front of a mound of sand saying "Technology required" to do this. MATE. It's a mound of sand, start digging.

The graveyard element also seems oddly peripheral. I spent the majority of my time playing the game chopping wood, planting crops and breaking rocks. There's so much Stardew stuff included that gets in the way of a very fun premise.

The story's also just a non-starter which made me disinclined to interact with any of the NPCs.

This sounds dismissive, but the best way I know how to describe it is "Stardew Valley if it was morbid and slightly less intuitive". It wears its inspiration on its sleeve but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.


It's really fun having to plan to unlock stuff on the technology trees that unlocks something else that unlocks something else in this big chain. For me personally, the biggest issue is slightly unintuitive decisions like locking the blue exp orbs behind a story event or having to put logs in this specific bin to use them even though you don't need to do that with other resources. But those are relatively small complaints that are fixed by putting enough time into it or maybe not being as dumb as me :^)


It's charm definitely comes from its morbidness and I think that means, in contrast to Stardew Valley, it's not for everyone. I do think most people who find horror movies fun would enjoy this, though.

Platinum difficult: 2/10
Time to Platinum: 80 hours

I love managment resource games and this was a blast to play and has a very dark humour, that is always welcome. The game doesn't tell you much about what to do, so it was kind of a rough start, but that was more fun to me. You're the graveyard keeper, so your mission is to take care of the graveyard in town (that's the short version, no spoilers), "autopsy" the dead bodies and take care of the tombs. Also you can work your farm, sell items, and even resurrect people as zombies and put them to work for you xD. Very fun platinum to get, but maybe not for everyone.

man i really appreciate the effort put into this. the polished look, a never-ending to-do list, unlockables and its humor kept me playing for hours on end, which in due time revealed the flawed game design buried deep within its core. not before long this game turns into an endless slog of walking, digging, chopping, building, building, sleeping, waiting, walking, walking, waiting, sleeping, rinse and repeat.

there's always something missing; always something in need to be built so you can build something else which allows you to build another thing which of course needs other buildings to be built so you can build an upgraded version of the building. a new built you might say.

the number grows, but to what end? akin to a pay-to-play mobile game there's no feeling of accomplishment or fun to be had -- all that is left is me stressing over fulfilling a busy checklist instead of enjoying the fruits of my graveyard keeping labor. sad!