The deathly tedium of Graveyard Keeper

Graveyard Keeper is a game that Kristal and I have had in our Steam wishlists since it was announced in February 2017, by developers Lazy Bear Games and publishers tinyBuild. Our respective waiting was put to an end on August 15, and I eagerly shelled out for a copy for each of us 😀 But now, I have… regrets…

(Parenthesis: I’m aware that the last blog post I wrote refers to my fear of dying, and yet I’m talking about a game which features death heavily. But, to clarify, it’s MY real-world death I’m terrified of. Hell, one of my favourite Discworld characters is Death himself.)

Let’s start with the premise. While walking home at night, your character is crossing the road while texting his love, when he’s hit by a vehicle. Oh dear. You’d have thought he’d have seen one of the many articles about the woman who fell into a fountain while texting, but apparently not. Anyway, it seems that death is not for him, at least not yet. A mysterious figure tasks him with becoming the keeper of a village graveyard; do it well enough, and returning back to “the real world” should supposedly be possible…

The title screen has a rather charming view of The Village, where you may be spending eternity…

As the bodies of the dearly departed are delivered by a particularly militant donkey pulling a cart, you collect them, and prepare them for the souls’ final destination by pulling body parts out of them. Each body has a quality rating, represented by a number of skulls. Additionally, those skulls can be either white or red, to signify good or sinful behaviour. Extracting materials from corpses will change this rating and balance of skulls, and the materials are used for other purposes… including cutting off a chunk of flesh for later consumption. Heh, heh.

Once you’ve finished meddling in the spiritual progression of your “customers”, you (eventually) have three choices of disposal:

• Bury them in the graveyard outside; this, along with the placement of accoutrements for the graves, improves the quality of the graveyard, which in turn increases the donations received from parishioners;
• Cremate them in the little grove over the road, once you’ve researched and built funeral pyres; or
• Dump them in the river, which flows towards The Town. Whether this has later consequences remains to be seen.

Actually, the burial, cremation or watery disposal of corpses is perhaps the least part of your duties as a graveyard keeper. As you work towards your ultimate goal of returning to the Land of the Living, you must also grow crops; create headstones and grave fences (“PUT A LITTLE FENCE AROUND IT!”); perform research; mine ores and minerals; chop down trees and clear bushes; conduct church services to gain faith and money; help spruce up a sacrifice zone, under the church, for a shady individual; and a fair bit more besides. Oh, and carry out the numerous fetch quests the various NPCs give you. I don’t have much of an issue with being pulled hither and yon by the demands of a game; I’m fairly used to that by now 😀 The definition of “graveyard keeper” is being stretched past breaking point, but it’s all reasonably fun.

I also love that, in the course of your multifarious duties, there’s a wide array of machinery and workstations you must construct and use. Having played and thoroughly enjoyed Factorio, and the Feed the Beast modpacks for Minecraft (which adds industrialisation and automation), this aspect of the game is a delight to me. Feed the Beast in particular has quite convoluted progression systems to acquire technology, and I happily took them on as a series of questlines. Graveyard Keeper’s progression system is similarly convoluted, and I quite like that; though as some reviewers on Steam have stated, it’s most definitely not their cup of tea. Each to their own, of course 🙂 Many of your actions result in the acquisition of technology points, which comes in three different colours, and can be spent in a technology tree to unlock items and different types of prayer.

How much you can do in any given day is governed by energy. Almost all of your “work actions” consume that energy; run out, and you’re greatly limited in what you can do. Foodstuffs and certain other items will replenish energy, as will sleeping. I rather like that you can sleep at any time of the day or night – something which speaks to me, given that I don’t have a sleep schedule to speak of 😉

There are two things in Graveyard Keeper, though, which really get my sacrificial goat, and the second is compounded by the first. And that first is having to walk everydamnwhere. I don’t know if it’s possible to get a faster means of transport, but it seems unlikely. And everything is so far apart. My friend Molethulu said there used to be a sprint function in the game, but that appears to have been removed. The issue is only partially mitigated by a couple of features: the first is a tunnel network which provides a quicker route into town, as well as going between your house and the church and morgue. The other is a teleportation stone, but that can only take you between your current location (except the dungeon) and either your home or the tavern. Unlocking more teleportation destinations, like in Skyrim and World of Warcraft, would go a long way towards making travel less of a hassle. That said, the cooldown on teleportation is apparently three minutes, which is frustrating to say the least.

The other problem is that certain resources, such as logs and large stones, can only be carried one at a time. I don’t know if this is because they are supposedly cumbersome… because you can also push a line of objects with your feet at the same time, if you’re sufficiently adept. A hand-drawn cart that could store several items would not go amiss, I can tell you. At the time of writing, I’ve got a lot of logs in the graveyard, from clearing out all the trees there, and I’m far from inclined to bring them back home. So they just sit there now.

Yeah… I don’t fancy lugging all of these back to the wood stockpile…

And they probably will for evermore. I’m 21 hours into Graveyard Keeper, had a fair amount of experience of the game, and I’ve just about given up on it. It’s disappointing, because the actual game mechanics are a huge amount of fun to me! I also love the graphics, the music and the deliciously macabre feel. But the delight I take in those aspects of the game is outweighed by the constant feeling of tedium. Sorry, Lazy Bear and Tiny Build, but as it stands, I can’t recommend Graveyard Keeper in good conscience.

UPDATE: Since this review was written, Lazy Bear have made changes which have caused me to reverse my viewpoint, and happily so. Click here to find out more.