I can't say I'm the target audience here, since Graveyard Keeper is just a step removed from survival crafters, and survival crafters are the genre I can absolutely not make any headway with, no matter how many times I try. But I played a boatload of Harvest Moon 64, so I feel like I have a bit of authority when it comes to fun with farms.

(I've also never played Stardew Valley, which hopefully offers a slightly different perspective from many of the other reviews.)

So it is a thumbs down, but hear me out. I waffled a lot, because ultimately I did have fun with Graveyard Keeper at first. It's just a lot to deal with. There's systems within systems and piles of things to pursue which ultimately leaves the game—and you as the player—feeling unfocused. You run a graveyard instead of a farm. Cool, there's your gimmick. But you also run an actual farm, and a church, and an apiary, and two different mines, and a cult, and a magic wizard lair and I ultimately set the game down because it feels like you're being pulled in way too many directions at once.

And Graveyard Keeper tries to help out with that by removing some of the genre limitations. For example, unlike the strict three years in Harvest Moons, you have effectively infinite weeks to follow through on quests and expand your property. But certain events only happen on certain days, which means half the time you're rushing to get everything done for two or three quests at once, and the other half you're just wasting time because it's five days before you can make any progress. Throw in the donkey constantly pulling you back to take care of a corpse delivery and it feels like you can barely keep up with chores on your own farm, let alone heading out to explore or fish or whatever.

It's also quite esoteric. For example, there are three different upgrade currencies, two of which are meaningless and one of which is hard locked to research, which is buried within your basement, which you need a key to get, which you need to gather faith for, which you need to open the church to do, which you need nice graves to do, which you need to start a farm to pay carrots for bodies, which requires doing a quest for land etc etc etc etc. Without blue currency, most of the skills are locked, including the ones that would make this chain easier. It felt like every time I wanted to do something I had to go six wiki pages deep to figure out how, like I was on one big constant Zelda trading quest. Throw in that the game LOVES gotchas; at one point they close your church unexpectedly until you spend a fortune on a license, when your church is the only reasonable way to make money in the first place. If you're not prepared, get ready for a vegetable grind.

But when the stars aligned and I could make progress on quests or skill development or whatever, it was kinda fun. I think my not recommend ultimately came down to the weird tone. The game wants you to be some kinda weird Sweeney Todd selling long pig to the kingdom, but your character is just a random guy from 2020 trapped in medieval purgatory who wants to go home. The dialogue wants to be biting black humour but it's just pretty much just tonally inconsistent obvious jokes. And yeah, building a farming game centred on autopsies certainly limits your audience a bit. My girlfriend likes these kind of games a lot, but she was pretty put off by the vibe here.

So it's a close one. Maybe if you've devastated every other farm game out there and want one with arguably too much content, you'll have more luck than me. But as for myself, I'm gonna sample a few others from the genre if I ever get HM64 nostalgia again.

I can't say I'm the target audience here, since Graveyard Keeper is just a step removed from survival crafters, and survival crafters are the genre I can absolutely not make any headway with, no matter how many times I try. But I played a boatload of Harvest Moon 64, so I feel like I have a bit of authority when it comes to fun with farms. (I've also never played Stardew Valley, which hopefully offers a slightly different perspective from many of the other reviews.) So it is a thumbs down, but hear me out. I waffled a lot, because ultimately I did have fun with Graveyard Keeper at first. It's just a lot to deal with. There's systems within systems and piles of things to pursue which ultimately leaves the game—and you as the player—feeling unfocused. You run a graveyard instead of a farm. Cool, there's your gimmick. But you also run an actual farm, and a church, and an apiary, and two different mines, and a cult, and a magic wizard lair and I ultimately set the game down because it feels like you're being pulled in way too many directions at once. And Graveyard Keeper tries to help out with that by removing some of the genre limitations. For example, unlike the strict three years in Harvest Moons, you have effectively infinite weeks to follow through on quests and expand your property. But certain events only happen on certain days, which means half the time you're rushing to get everything done for two or three quests at once, and the other half you're just wasting time because it's five days before you can make any progress. Throw in the donkey constantly pulling you back to take care of a corpse delivery and it feels like you can barely keep up with chores on your own farm, let alone heading out to explore or fish or whatever. It's also quite esoteric. For example, there are three different upgrade currencies, two of which are meaningless and one of which is hard locked to research, which is buried within your basement, which you need a key to get, which you need to gather faith for, which you need to open the church to do, which you need nice graves to do, which you need to start a farm to pay carrots for bodies, which requires doing a quest for land etc etc etc etc. Without blue currency, most of the skills are locked, including the ones that would make this chain easier. It felt like every time I wanted to do something I had to go six wiki pages deep to figure out how, like I was on one big constant Zelda trading quest. Throw in that the game LOVES gotchas; at one point they close your church unexpectedly until you spend a fortune on a license, when your church is the only reasonable way to make money in the first place. If you're not prepared, get ready for a vegetable grind. But when the stars aligned and I could make progress on quests or skill development or whatever, it was kinda fun. I think my not recommend ultimately came down to the weird tone. The game wants you to be some kinda weird Sweeney Todd selling long pig to the kingdom, but your character is just a random guy from 2020 trapped in medieval purgatory who wants to go home. The dialogue wants to be biting black humour but it's just pretty much just tonally inconsistent obvious jokes. And yeah, building a farming game centred on autopsies certainly limits your audience a bit. My girlfriend likes these kind of games a lot, but she was pretty put off by the vibe here. So it's a close one. Maybe if you've devastated every other farm game out there and want one with arguably too much content, you'll have more luck than me. But as for myself, I'm gonna sample a few others from the genre if I ever get HM64 nostalgia again.