Graveyard Keeper - and scholar, and miner, and carpenter, and herbalist, and alchemist, and farmer, and merchant, and priest, and mortician, and chef, and match maker, and masonist, and fisherman, and blacksmith, and jeweller, and brewer, and …

The Price : I can’t remember I’m pretty sure I got it from a humble bundle but its £16.75 on steam The Total Play Time : 34.4hrs (finished the game, achieved 43 of the base games 62 achievements)

The Review :

I struggled. I really did. I struggled to play the game, I struggled to gain the motivation to finish the game, and when it was over, I was relieved. And now I struggle even more because despite an overall negative experience, I cannot outright condemn the game as a bad one.

To say that it is a bad game is to forsake the genuinely fun and entertaining moments it's gameplay offers, or the sheer amount of content the game provides, or the lovely music that augments your sessions, or some of the funny dialogue with the NPCs.

But to say that it is a good game is to ignore the abysmal cohesion of the game’s different systems, the severe lack of clarity of the more important mechanics, and the unnecessary obfuscation of the games content with a frankly silly amount of crafting stations (to name just one source of abject frustration) .

I apologise. I am riled but it’s not the worst parts of the game that have done that to me, but the best parts, and the promise they have. I think it would be better to start again on a different note.

Thematically, the game is really novel. The premise is quite cool, something it leans into and builds upon throughout the entire game. You die, in real life, and awake in a fantasy mediaeval era village, more specifically the cemetery of that village. Everyone assumes you are its new keeper and calls you as such. Not wanting to stick out you oblige, while confiding in a few notable characters of your real past. The main story is entirely your interaction with these characters, uncovering their history and helping with their quests. You arrive a stranger but eventually become a welcome friend to all these people after you help them with their lives. Visually, the game has a strong identity with its semi realistic, mediaeval pixel art style that is consistent all the way through. Better animations may have helped break the back of the monotony the game suffers with but what is there is still good, and well propped up by the quality of the artwork. Even though there are still some issues in the story and with the characters, most of those are forgivable. It is what comes next which is the main culprit. The actual gameplay. It is confusing from the very beginning. So little is explained to you directly, and so little is conveyed to you through design. So much is available to begin with, and there is little easing into the game's features. At first it was a little daunting but as an enjoyer of grindy games, it did not deter me. Even though I was thrown into the deep end, I found that by having a few wiki pages open and a persevering attitude about it all I was easily able to get through the beginning and slowly began piecing it together. The early hours were fun but unfortunately the cracks were already starting to appear. To sum these cracks as clearly as I can:

There exists an interconnectedness in Graveyard Keeper that rises above everything else, even (and most notably) fun. To have every single thing interact in some way with absolutely everything else can be a ball-ache. To have every single thing also require its own unique tech skill and crafting station is an outright ball-twister. What's more is the game’s story demands that you engage with almost everything it has to offer to a high degree in order to finish, taking away a lot of player agency in what could otherwise be a really fun sandbox. A sandbox the game initially appears to be.

The simple consequence is that the pacing feels forcibly slow and deeply unsatisfying. The initial joy you feel when you build a new crafting station so you can make new items is quickly replaced by nothing. Absolutely nothing. Probably even dissatisfaction, as you realise that progression has been artificially - not meaningfully - extended. That is to say, the new items you can now make facilitate barely even a trickle of new gameplay, and in fact almost entirely serve as tools to make the next crafting station. Of which the next crafting stations items almost entirely serve as tools to make the next crafting station. Of which the next crafting stations items almost entirely serve as tools to make the next crafting station … and so on. The mid game is ruined by having the game’s adequate mechanics stretched out beyond their logical limits. The joy of progression is quickly stripped from you as you begin the marathon to the end, struggling to find the fun. Or at least that's what happened to me. There was about 20 more hours of mid game until I reached the final quests which were alright but I had already lost a lot of investment at that point.

As a core issue, it's pretty damning. Unfortunately there were many minor issues which acted as final nails in the coffin (I dont have the heart to do some kind of mortician pun). Everything felt really far away and it took ages to get anywhere. You can buy a teleporter stone but because there are no tooltips and the gameplay is pretty unforgiving, I assumed it was limited in how many times you could use it. It isn't, go crazy with it. You also get access to speed potions later on in the game. Godsend but I highly recommend just buying them opposed to making them as they require blood, which is valuable because you need an absurd amount of it for one section of the game. The important NPCs are only available on certain days of the week. While this feels okay at first because you don't need much from them to begin with, when the story quests start ramping up there is a lot of back and forth between all of them as their quests are interconnected. By the end of the game this resulted in a lot of waiting. There was simply too little late game to keep me engaged enough to do idle tasks between the days, opting instead to just use the meditation area where you can fast forward time indefinitely. All the unique and important-enough-to-need-their-own-crafting-station items all just blend into one another and it becomes impossible to recall the specific items and quantity you needed to take with you to fix something across the map. Coupled with the fact it can take ages to get there, you better hope you remembered it correctly. Was it 4 nails and 3 simple parts and 3 planks? Or was it 2 complex parts? Or was it 4 filch? Fuck, cant remember? Pull up the wiki or go back and write it down on some paper. There's little visual distinction between them, making each new item just feel like a variation of something you already had, which leaves a bitter taste in your mouth as you had to jump through a lot of hoops to get it. There's no charm in anything you do. Every expenditure of energy is just watching a stunted animation and a red bar fill up. It's not fun to watch a bar fill up thousands of times. Because everything is linked to everything else, it never really feels like you as a person progress. It feels inorganic that the produce I grew in the garden is better not because I became a better farmer, but because I made better fertiliser in the basement under the church. That fertiliser came about because I unlocked it in the tech tree, and slapped together the right ingredients. I never felt like I was rewarded for playing the game, I felt like I was rewarded for progressing through the tech tree. Maybe it's a subtle difference and maybe for a lot of people it's not a difference that matters, but to me it gave a hollow ring to every action. It didn’t feel like I had gained or earned any mastery over the game.

If the game were half the content, with the time and effort on the cut half spent instead on streamlining and polishing the content that mattered, Graveyard Keeper would be incredible. It would have a better sense of identity as it doubled down on core mechanics. It would be focused and rewarding. It would be smooth and enjoyable. It would have a lot less problems with pacing. Instead, it's like wading through a bog as wide as the ocean. If really grindy games are your thing then there's something here. It is by no means a bad game, and for many people it would certainly be good. For me, I’ve spent enough of my mental capacity on it, and I just want to play something else now. I’m happy I finished it.