In this article, I give you my quick review of the video game Graveyard Keeper. Let’s dive into the most inaccurate medieval graveyard management game.
That’s how the developers at Lazy Bear Games themselves describe graveyard keeper and I’m inclined to agree.
However, it makes the game sound far more boring than it actually is. The only really dry thing here is the talking skull Kerry who nurses a teeny tiny alcohol problem. I keep wondering where the liquid goes or how he drinks without hands arms legs and feet.
Anyway, meeting this delightful fellow is a gleam of hope for a character at the beginning of the game. Although, beating dying in a car accident while calling your loved one isn’t that hard.
You wake up in a medieval world as the new keeper of a graveyard that is in dire need of some renovation.
Throughout the following days weeks or even months, it’s your job to fix the cemetery, refurbish your garden, and open the little Church to further your relationships with the villagers.
Hmm doesn’t it sound a little familiar? This game shares a ton of similarities with games from the Harvest Moon series or even more with the popular Stardew Valley.
Colorful pixel graphics and the mix of mechanics involving harvesting, crafting and sucking up to the other inhabitants of this world.
Admittedly, I’ve never been the biggest fan of these games and I know it’s almost sacrilegious to not love Stardew Valley. But I guess for me it’s just a little too almost annoyingly happy.
Turns out, the dark spin graveyard keeper puts on this genre was exactly what I’ve been missing all along.
Collecting flowers to gift your crush? Nah. I’d rather extract a skull from a corpse, bring it to the local astrologer who will in turn, hopefully, help me to find a way back home.
Seriously, it almost worries me a bit how much more fun I have. Cutting hundreds of trees and mining minerals for hours when there’s burning of witches, autopsies, and even a tiny bit of cannibalism involved. Even trying to understand which technologies need to unlock to be finally able to cremate bodies.
I don’t have space for is somehow okay and those networks are pretty overwhelming at first. Overwhelmed is in general a rather fitting term for your state of mind at the beginning of graveyard keeper. Thankfully the scale I mentioned earlier is helping you to fulfill your new duties. A talking donkey delivers deaf people to your more every couple days and whenever he visits he rings a bell.
Trust me you will learn to hate that bell and where does even get all those corpses? There must be something going on in this world that kills humans by the hundreds and thousands every time you hear that lovely sound the time’ is on.
The longer it takes you to bury the body the worse the reputation of your graveyards. You need to reach a certain level to even unlock multiple aspects of the game. You can only earn faith through holding services every Sunday and for that, you need to open the church same for the theology branch of technologies in a pinch.
You can always decorate a grave to balance out a corpse that’s been out for too long but that comes at a cost as well tombstones don’t grow on trees, you know.
Everything you do in graveyard keeper costs energy and doesn’t that sound like some horrible mobile game but no worries you won’t find any advertisement videos or microtransactions in this morbid adventure.
A brief nap is all you need to refill your energy meter or you can munch on some veggies. Why no meat? Well, one of the only meat providers seems to be you and you harvest that meat from that humans. Do you really want to go down that route?
Actually, if you decide to give this game a try you might as well go all-in. Raise the pious for the Inquisition which is some corpses and don’t worry too much about ethics or morale, have some fun. It certainly makes the grind far less tedious just don’t overwork yourself. Who knows, if you pass out the next graveyard keeper might think you belong underground as well.