Welcome to our review of Graveyard Keeper – a management simulator from the creators of Punch Club. Have you ever wondered how it would be to run a medieval cemetery? Neither had I, but I certainly was intrigued!
According to Lazy Bear the game Graveyard Keeper “is the most inaccurate medieval cemetery management sim of the year. Build & manage your own graveyard while finding shortcuts to cut costs, expand into entertainment with witch-burning festivals, and scare nearby villagers into attending church. This is a game of capitalism and doing whatever it takes to build a thriving business.” So, if you are historical knowledgeable or even a history teacher/historian (as I am myself), please take this game with a huge bottle of salt. It’s wrong on so many levels, but hey, that’s what’s makes it fun, doesn’t it.
Like I said in my review for Punch Club, Graveyard Keeper is a game developed by Lazy Bear Games, a small indie game studio based in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. The studio was founded six years ago by two friends as Game Jam Studio and changed its name to Lazy Bear Games in April 2015. They are mostly known for the earlier mentioned game, and now tap into another genre, namely medieval graveyard simulators.
Gameplay:
Unlike Punch Club, Graveyard Keeper is completely open world structured with medieval roads to travel from the graveyard to the city, swamp or church. The main premise of the game is about a man who died and woke up as a medieval graveyard keeper in another world. His quest to return to his own world will lead him to becoming the best graveyard keeper the world has ever seen. To help you out, the game offers you a talking skull.. because of Medieval times and such. Everyone seems strangely okay with you just showing up and being the new graveyard keeper and such. Even if you proclaim you come from another world, they just look at you and think you drank too much absinthe.
Let’s have a quick look at the features of the game, so I can point out the things I did not really like about the game (which kinda sucks, since I really liked Punch Club).
Face ethical dilemmas. Do you really want to spend money on that proper hotdog meat for the festival when you have so many resources lying around?
Gather valuable resources & craft new items. Expand your Graveyard into a thriving business, go ahead and gather valuable resources scattered in the surrounding areas, and explore what this land has to offer.
Make business alliances. These dead bodies don’t need all that blood, do they? Why not sell it to someone who can put it to good use. Same for body parts. Hey, it’s being efficient with recycling!
Explore mysterious dungeons. No medieval game would be complete without these. Take a trip into the unknown and find useful new ingredients which may or may not poison a whole bunch of nearby villagers. Capitalism.
The idea of the game is good. Why not autopsy some of the bodies in the morgue and sell them as ‘meat’ to the town tavern. Meat is a rare material in the world of Graveyard Keeper after all, and hey capitalism. Gathering resources felt a little like Stardew Valley, and maybe that’s the main problem I have with the game. It feels like Stardew Graveyard, but without the guidance and help the developers gave in Punch Club. The game is massive on the in-depth part of gameplay – you can expand crafting, occult, and other tech trees into parts of your wildest dreams. But the game does not give you any pointers on when to create certain story-wise-needed machinery for example. I often felt lost in the world of Stardew Graveyard, and could not figure out how to progress further into the game without looking towards the internet for help.
Wiki & Artstyle
The official game wiki for Graveyard Keeper is still expanding, so not much help there, but I did find a lot of people online talking about the same ‘lost’-feeling I experienced during my playthrough. I thought I had the hang of it after my first exploration into the game, so I started over to build a better graveyard, only to find myself bored and stuck again. I personally never felt satisfied during my playthroughs of the game. There was a sense of completion missing, since the game throws everything you can do at you – at once. Think of it as opening Rollercoaster Tycoon, but before entering a tutorial you are warped into a multi-hectare amusement park which has been around for twenty years and everyone around you knows exactly what they are supposed to do, except for you.
Lazybear delivered another 16bit game, with lovely music and a great sense of humor. They even added a slight wink towards Punch Club here and there, in which they basically say how bad some of the mechanics actually were. I applaud LazyBear and TinyBuild for these things. But since the world is massive, it takes a lot of time walking towards one of the towns to the graveyard. It makes replaying the first few days of a playthrough not very.. comfortable.
Conclusion:
Graveyard Keeper is a promising game, but is just not my cup of tea. I could not get myself to invest hours and hours in a game that does not want to be explored in a step-by-step manner we usually see with management simulation games. Maybe I’ll revisit the game once the Wiki is more extensive and I can find the right balance to do and create things. Until then, this game leaves me rather unsatisfied.
