friendos ♥

Graveyard Keeper has been on my list forever, but I never got around to it until the game was made free to advertise the upcoming sequel. I assumed it was Stardew Valley with Dead People, but it's really only superficially similar in terms of the overall game loop. This game is more crafting-focused, with a surprising amount of detail regarding corpse preparations, embalming, etc. This is a portal fantasy, sort of, and darkness is afoot, as there are witches being burned at the stake and the game allows selling cadaver flesh as meat or making candles out of body fat. There is farming, but it's simplified (you don't have to water crops and they don't wither as far as I can tell) and it's mostly intended to create ingredients for the wide-ranging crafting system.

Early game is a little stressful, as you're constantly running out of energy. New corpses arrive on a regular basis and it can be a struggle to inter them timely between the other chores, and if you don't, the body quality decays, which impacts your cemetery rating. Once you settle into the game, you have to trade carrots to get body deliveries, which helps a lot and lets the player control the pacing, and you can also grow and cook carrots for an easy energy boost so you don't have to constantly forage for berries and mushrooms. It also took me a while to finally generate blue points for upgrades, so I was still in limbo for a while needing to progress but being unable to do so until I unlocked the church and the ability to give sermons, and in turn, study items for blue points.

There is A LOT of walking around, and very often, walking to place, realizing you need certain items to repair a bridge or whatever, and having to walk all the way back. I found myself needing to consult a wiki a lot, because a lot of aspects of the game aren't explained or easily discoverable. There is a lot of crafting, and a lot of ingredient creation or foraging are required. Some areas are deliberately tedious, like the swamp, which is difficult to traverse, and if you get to the end and don't have the equipment to build a bridge you have to walk aaaaall the way back.

That being said, I've been sucked into this game over the past few days. I like upgrading and maintaining the cemetery, and I kinda like how sprawling the main area is. The forest and surrounding areas FEEL big, remote, and unexplored. A significant gameplay strategy is finding ways to make ingredient gathering more convenient, so you can cut logs or stone slabs and carry them back to your house, but you can only carry one log or slab at at time. Hopefully there's some kind of cart later.

The amount of work required for crafting ingredients, considering how much stuff needs to be crafting, can be pretty time-consuming. I've reached a point now where I just carry around a big stack of nails, planks, hinges, etc., and I still manage to find myself in situations where I don't have what I need. The sequel appears to emphasize automation which, at least at this stage in the original game, would help. The only automation I've found so far is the furnace, which I can use to create iron bars from ore.

I'm definitely enjoying this one for what it is, there is always something to do and I really like the cemetery maintenance aspect, but I'm already at the point where the more advanced crafting is getting a bit tedious. I find myself taking notes to keep up with what ingredients are needed for what project and help remember where things are on the map, which just emphasizes the lack of useful in-game information. But I think this will definitely be a one-and-done for me, and not a game I revisit. The game is a bit too stingy in terms of time management, and while it definitely fits the pseudo-medieval vibe, the devs have made very intentional choices to create player inconvenience and those limitations become more annoying as time goes on.

x-posted from .club ( Read more... )