Graveyard Keeper is a neat twist on the farming simulator genre where instead of a proper farm - although you can have a small one - you run a graveyard. Filled with way too many things to do as these games are, I had a really good time with it, up to the point where the volume of systems stacking on top of each other came crashing down on my impatience to complete the next tasks I would need to progress through the story. If you have infinite time and love slowly going through systems, I highly recommend Graveyard Keeper.
The game starts simple enough; you are a modern-day man thrown into some medieval-looking fantasy town and you are quickly identified as the gravekeeper. Your basic function there is to bury corpses by using a blueprint desk at the graveyard. Blueprint desks exist in all locations where you can build things and this is where you’ll use the patterns you’ve learned and the materials you’ve gathered to create different stations with many uses. By doing simple chores, you get red and green knowledge points and by studying specific items and crafting gravestones, you get blue knowledge. This is used to unlock technologies that give you passive abilities or allow you to craft more stuff. Blue knowledge always felt a bit too hard to get, but I suppose it’s one way to meter your progress through the game.
NPCs will give you quests along the way, improving the quality of your graveyard, buying wine, etc. These quests unlock new areas of the maps and a bit more story, so I supposed that you are supposed to prioritize doing them, which ultimately frustrated me to no end, but more on that later. The NPCs are also not present at all times, they usually have one day of the week where they’ll be present, which works fine in theory, but when you have everything to complete a quest, waiting six in-game days can be boring. You will need to chop trees, mine rocks, gather fruits and vegetables, farm crops, maintain your graveyard, explore the world, mine more exotic materials, cook, chop wooden logs into planks, turn iron ore into iron bars and then into iron nails and move back and forth the map to do a lot of busywork. Your inventory space is somewhat limited and there are crafting stations everywhere, forcing you to go somewhere, note what you need, go back to grab your stuff and then go craft.
In order to study items and gain the most of your blue knowledge, you need to use the study table, which requires faith, one of the resources I liked least in the game. Once a week - after you’ve unlocked them - you can give a sermon which will give you faith and money - they can give other things but I never got there - based on how well you perform. Faith is used to study items and also for other random things, like creating zombies - which automate certain tasks. You’ll never know what needs faith and you’ll always have something to spend it on, so you’ll often need to wait a whole week before you can craft whatever you wanted to. Some systems are strangely explained, the autopsy system for instance, is one where you remove (or add) organs from a corpse and try to lower their ‘red skull’ count. The game gave me an half explanation for this after hour 15, for some reason.
Ultimately, the reason why I stopped playing Graveyard Keeper is the amount of systems stacking on top of each other in order to complete any simple task. I wanted to create ink in order to complete a few quests. I could buy it, but I was trying to save my money so I decided to do it all myself. To make ink you need black paint, which requires advanced flasks, graphite powder and water. To have graphite powder you need to have studied graphite - which takes some faith - and use a mill, which requires polished marble blocks. These blocks are crafted with a technology you’ll need a lot of knowledge for. I did everything and managed to get my black paint. I then needed a feather, so I scoured low and high to find if I could raise chickens to get eggs and feathers, but no, you need to buy the feathers. For some reason that moment broke my motivation to keep playing. I had almost done everything myself, but at this point there was nothing I could do to be self-sufficient, even if 99% of the process had been so.
Still, Graveyard Keeper is really neat and could occupy you for hours upon hours since there is so much stuff to do, I had a great time with it until I stopped having fun, but I still recommend it!
