Indie Review: Graveyard Keeper

Ever wanted a job far away from the noise of town? A job where you can work under the warm sun and have the pleasure of digging the earth with your own two hands. Now you can have that by working at your own cemetery.

Graveyard keeper is a life simulator game created by Lazy Bear Games, where as the name suggest, we must take care of a cemetery. As the take carers of the cemetery we have many responsibilities that are not only limited to the death or what comes after.

When i first saw the game i thought it was going to by a macabre version of a Harvest moon game but in actuality is more of a macabre version of Stardew valley. Even the art style somewhat resembles it, although the lack of strong colores helps keep an spooky ambience by making the world look like it is in eternal autumn.

In what goes for gameplay is your typical life simulator, everyday you have a set amount of stamina to perform different labors but you can also explore, visit the town and spend time with the locals or fight monsters.

The center of your life is your cemetery were you will have to take care of it’s dead resident. The systems around this are fairly entertaining and although they can be a bit obtuse at the start they get simpler as you understand them. By the point you can get zombie helpers it become really fun to play around with body parts.

Besides the gravekeeper activities, there is a great variety of other systems that bring other jobs to the table, all of them much simpler and easy to understand. This odd jobs go from farming to dungeoneering and serve as good side activities. May favorite one is to be a preach as there are a lot of way to pray and each brings different benefits.

Throughout the game there is always an air of dark humor that although it can get tiring, when things go to the silly end of the spectrum it can be quite amusing.

No matter how good the main mechanics are in my mind a life simulator must have a world populated with people you want to interact. Sadly the aren’t many characters i liked, what i love was that to become friends with them you needed to follow a quest line for them instead of giving them gift everyday like other similar life simulators. Still the few characters that i like, i loved them like Clotho the witch and Episcop the bishop, although the talking Donkey can go straight to hell.

Beside the lack of interesting characters i had other problems that individually aren’t deal breakers but by the late game can become tedious. Firstly the lack of centralization, with so many systems there are a lot of work and blueprints station around the map and can be a chore to get resources from one to the other. Making the first problem worst is the character speed, he is too slow and can take forever to go from one place to another. Lastly the end game can be a tedious grind and may keep many from seeing the ending.

Yes, this game has a main story line with an ending that can be entertaining, especially when learning about the town but has an underwhelming ending in my opinion. I have to note that the underwhelming ending may be intentional as the game creators have made many troll jokes for the player throughout the game. The worst clear offender was the lightning strike after getting the town pass, maybe someone can find this jokes funny, i just found them annoying.

In the end Graveyard keeper is a game of acceptable quality that i would only recommend to fans of the genre that want a different take on it. Although this is only because Rune factory isn’t available on steam.

Get the game on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/599140/Graveyard_Keeper/