(VIDEO REVIEW COMING SOON)

Stumbling around Twitch in the browse section I found some streamers playing a game where you take care of a graveyard instead of the usual farm. With the beautiful pixel art visuals and unique dark tasks you must do as a graveyard keeper. I just had to get my hands on this game and shortly after I found it on Humble bundle for a great deal. I knew it was fate. Graveyard Keeper isn’t your typical game, with some similarities to Stardew Valley it takes an interesting turn with maintaining a graveyard, dissecting bodies for their parts so you can trade with the village along with researching, and communicate with a talking Donkey that delivers the corpses to your door step! Lazy Bear Games truly made an interesting game that is very hard to put down.

Our story starts off with a regular guy walking down the street looking at Tinder and suddenly a flash of light covers the screen and we are in this dark and foggy environment. The dark figure in front of us explains that we are the Graveyard Keeper now and we must dig up Gerry to help us out in understanding what are tasks will be. After walking outside our new home, we find a graveyard just right outside and dig out Gerry, which he doesn’t remember much but is still very helpful. Once we are done t talking with Gerry there is a very political Donkey that delivers dead bodies to the front of the graveyard. From here we must collect the bodies and deliver them to the morgue for extracting parts like meat, which is used to either cook our own food or for trading at the local Tavern. I assume the people look the other way and just believe its beef. Other parts you can collect from bodies is skin, which can be used to create pigskin and eventually clean paper for more advance recipes down the line. Once you’re done mutilating the body, its your job to craft a gravesite and then put the body into the grave and decorate it to build up your graveyard quality. Doing so will achieve certain tasks for the Bishop which will unlock new recipes and unlock the church where you will be the pastor and spread the good word for faith points and extra money.

Taking care of your graveyard is very simple. Once a body arrives, you’ll see the rating of it and its decomposing percentage. When you take it to the morgue and start working on the body it’ll reduce the quality of the corpse as you take out parts which will have more negative points when you bury the body. Best option is to just chuck that body into the nearby river.
Since there’s little explanation, you’ll be learning a lot of things on your own. Gerry is a good tour guide but there will be a few things he will explain. The Keeper has an energy bar and as he works on tasks it will deplete. Sometimes faster depending on the task. To combat this, you can craft potions and food to replenish your energy and work the night away. The night and day cycle are very short so being able to sleep for a few seconds isn’t a bad thing to do either.

The skill tree seems very big and can be fun to explore. Crafting items has a lot of depth to it but not a whole lot of explanation. The name of the game for this aspect is grinding. You’ll be spending days either mining and cutting down trees or refining your materials till you run out of energy. Long as your system is organized it can be fun to just spend around 20 minutes or more just gathering resources. As you advance in certain trees you’ll also gain perks like Butcher which will help give you less of a chance of a surgical error or Journalist where you can collect a story from talking with other characters.

The experience system in Graveyard Keeper is fun and exciting to build up. You have three forms of experience points. Red is for activities like cutting trees, mining, and using your crafting stations. Green is earned from farming, gathering plants, and chopping trees as well. Blue is different from the rest because it’ll be earned through certain spiritual tasks, working with the studying table to learn about the items you collect, and producing items such as candles, and writing.

In Graveyard Keeper you’re also able to gather quests or “tasks” to do from various NPCs through out your adventures. The quests are very long term and they will have an unlimited amount of time to be completed so they’re a real good way to give you some direction while you gather resources and explore your skill trees. The real importance of the days is certain NPCs are available during that day of the week which gives the game even more depth since the characters have a routine in the town.

Overall, Graveyard Keeper is an interesting game that goes a different direction. Although the lack of direction can be a turn off for most people, if you stick with it, you’ll be carving at dead bodies like a professional in no time. I recommend this game considering later down the line you’ll have dungeons to explore and zombies! If that won’t hook you, I don’t know what will.

Follow me on social media!

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/beardedvfx

YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5VdqhB9OCEtfBU-Owo2KKQ

TWITCH: https://www.twitch.tv/beardedvfx