Graveyard Keeper
Released: August 15, 2018
Game Length: 65 Hours
Grade: C
Preliminary
The Search For a Good Game: Every now and then I'll get to this point where I'm scavenging for a good game. I stumbled across a Youtuber by the name of Oddheader that finds unusual easter eggs in games. In one of his videos, he talks about a game called Event[0] where someone did the most impossible task by sweet talking a computer in letting you go. It was an old game that was released back in 2016 and was included inside April 2017 Humble Bundle package. Despite the interesting concept of conversing with an AI on a station, the game did not do well in recognizing my commands or respond appropriately to my language. After quickly abandoning that game, I decided to take a second look at a game I've been watching for a couple years now called Twelve Minutes, but found its extremely exclusive and linear gameplay upon its release very off-putting. So, I quickly dismissed that game and continued my search.
What about this game? While reviewing my 50-Game Dash, I realized that I never did get around to playing Graveyard Keeper. A lot of people compare it to Stardew Valley, as some have come to compare that game to Terraria. While other people view it as a side-step to the genre like with the developers of Starbound. I figured that the game might have actually gotten quite a bit better since its 1.3 Update back in October 27, 2020. The problem is that its added features came with a price. Although the "Breaking Bad" DLC was included with the original game, the "Game of Crone" DLC & "Stranger Sins" DLC cost $10 each. The original game was only $20. That was until the Collector's Edition came down to $15 during the Steam Summer Sale back in June. That's when I figured it would be a good time to try it out. My results were mixed.
Different Approach to the Farming Sim
Dark Humor: It was clear from the start when they released their Announcement Trailer in 2017 that this game was going to poke fun at a bunch of stereotypes. The description of the game sums it up as "the most inaccurate medieval cemetery management sim of all time. Build and manage your own graveyard, and expand into other ventures, while finding shortcuts to cut costs. Use all the resources you can find. After all, this is a game about the spirit of capitalism, and doing whatever it takes to build a thriving business. And it’s also a love story." To further this, the top bullet point describes of how you will be faced with "ethical dilemmas" where you might have the option to "spend money on that proper burger meat for the witch-burning festival." The game is funny when the protagonist reacts to everything with sarcasm, wit, dead-pan responses, and references to the modern world. There are also a ton of random encounters that will subvert your expectations of the game - most of which is to mock fun of the fact that there is missing content. Even the ending pokes fun of the fact that nothing happens once you complete your objective.
Requirements: Sadly, the game does not provide you with a choice in the matter. You will have to do everything if you want to complete the game. This can lead you to several unsavory moments where you wish there was another way. Most of the game's "choices" will simply branch you out into crafting your own material or buying them off someone. Since the majority of the quests ask for material from higher-tiers, you will constantly be scrounging up whatever coinage you can to advance the questlines. Choose the wrong dialogue option, and you will find one of the earliest quests asking you for 1g before you can establish a business. It can be excruciating difficult to get even 12g to become an Aristocrat in order to upgrade the church when what you sell to vendors comes to around 1s. There is also one really awful decision at the end of "Game of Crones" DLC where a simple dialogue choice will wipe out your entire Refugee Camp.
Differences to Stardew Valley
Almost everyone I know has probably played Stardew Valley at some point in their life. If you haven't, I highly suggest checking it out. But what I want to do is highlight the major points of Graveyard Keeper that strays away from Stardew Valley:
- Traveling - In the early stages of the game, you will be required to explore the landscape. You won't be given a horse to ride around in, but you will be given the option to craft speed potions. However, the biggest advantage you have in this game is the Teleportstone (which surprisingly didn't make it into the game until Update 1.023). It merely costs 2s from the main tavern and will teleport you to a series of important locations after you visit them. There is no fancy animation or loading screen to wait through. The 30-second cooldown lasts shorter than it would take you to travel to the next location.
- Energy - For some reason, food does not restore your health. Combat is very limited in this game to the point where the only thing that restores your health is a health potion or resting in bed. Instead, food is only there to restore your energy. You will be constantly eating. Instead of expending your energy over a period of "actions" in the field, the amount you use depends on what you are working on. Something simplistic like collecting berries would definitely require less energy than the collected food can restore. However, crafting a pack of nails only takes a matter of seconds and consumes 25% of your total energy. At least walking doesn't cost energy.
- Dungeons - Speaking of health, the game practically wants you to die inside a dungeon. There are a couple of armor and weapon upgrades, but combat is reduced to swinging a sword directly in front of you. There are a total of 15 dungeon levels. You cannot teleport out of them, you may only leave by going down a level or by dying (which would send you home with your whole inventory intact), the levels and their enemies do not reset, and any items left on the ground will disappear. There will be a gate at the end of level 9 that will require quest completion in order to progress to the last 5 levels. All enemies must be defeated on a level before you can proceed to the next one.
- Day Cycle - Instead of your usual seven days of the week, the game has six days where a certain quest-giver will appear during each cycle. The fact that each individual represents one of the deadly sins is ironic since "greed" is oddly absent from the rotation. Pride Day is unique in which bodies are not delivered to the Morgue and a sermon can be given at the church. Depending on the behavior of the person, some characters will leave the moment the sun goes down while others will continue to stay at their post indefinitely. The game doesn't force you to sleep, but your character will generate a degrading "tired" status after draining a certain amount of energy. Resting in a bed not only removes this effect, but advances time at an accelerated rate, restores your health & energy, and saves your game. You can easily spend one second in bed and return to work with no consequences.
- Economy - The biggest hurdle people will have is buying and selling goods. The vendors are smart in the fact that they will raise the price if their inventory gets smaller and lower the price of goods the more you try to sell them. Despite some gathering vendors buying things like nails, stone, and flitch, most of the things you craft will not be sellable. There isn't a magic box that you can throw everything in and out pops money. Vendors will also have advanced tiers locked until you build up your reputation through bartering items or advancing reputation through quests. Both the bishop and the blacksmith were still locked at tier 1 for me even after completing their quest chains.
- Information - Perhaps the second biggest problem the game has is how information is displayed. Although the DLC quests are color-coded, almost every quest in the game has a certain vagueness to them. Some quests might specify a certain type of item that is required - like a silver pumpkin - while others simply state that a person needs assistance. You will have to scroll through every person listed in the game in order to find all the quests that are available. You will not always be given "an objective" to refer to later in order to advance a questline either. You are completely left in the dark for what item converts to what at all the various alchemy stations until you "study" items and obtain alchemy recipes (5s each or rewarded after finding an item in the "Stranger Sins" DLC). How to earn "blue" tech points can be a nightmare! Remembering what material you need to bring to finish a construction job can be a pain too.
- Building - Constructing stations and other structures is exclusive to specific fields in the world. You first need to find a blueprint laying around somewhere and, with the right material in hand, select what you want to build. Only then can you see what areas is available to build and how you can arrange it. This can be devastating since certain jobs will require that one large spot you filled up with two smaller ones. You only receive a partial refund upon destroying a structure and it has to be selected first from the control panel and then manually removed by hand. At least you are able to rotate some of the buildings before placing them.
- Crafting: Let me preface this that I personally love the crafting system. You can see all the items out on the field from your inventory menu and items automatically combine and are neatly arranged when you move them around. Stations automatically detect items in trunks when you craft and provides you with the option to queue up tasks before crafting... with an infinity option just by double clicking the 'Y' button. What I don't like is when the game cuts you off this feature. If you queue up items to heat up, there isn't an option to change it. I understand but also dislike how the system forces you to adjust the quality of an item before you can craft it, whether or not you have the other types available. This process is doubly annoying when you realize only one of these items can be crafted at a time (without the queue system).
- Performance: There are a lot of little things in this game that gradually add up to a big problem - zombie stations suddenly stopping after the first item, stuttering whenever I cross into a new area, or the way I have to walk down long corridors before getting to the next area. Perhaps the biggest offender is how little certain professions contribute to the brunt of the game. Fishing and cooking only provides you with a handful of bronze coins per item (if a vendor will buy it in the first place). The Tavern in the "Stranger Sins" DLC will consistently sell wine, booze, and beer for a better profit margin, but food only sells during an event (the value depends on which event is chosen). Since you only need 200 points for your graveyard, there is no need to improve your rating by making potions to embalm your corpses or making fancy tombstones. However, manipulating the body can increase the effectiveness of zombies when they perform certain duties and there's nothing stopping you from doing these things for for the sheer fun of it.
Problems
Bugs: It is a sad day when you find a game with as many bugs and problems in it as Assassin's Creed. It feels like many of the mechanics are unpolished and the game was rushed out with missing features. Some crafted items don't even have a purpose! Let me go through a few of them for you:
- Magnetism: Instead of automatically rewarding you a specific item, the developers decided to go the route of "dropping" items on the ground and then having your character pick them up. This means that items can remain persistant in the world if your inventory is full. It also means that things can get rather messy if you accidentally leave stuff behind. Logs can be scattered all over the forest and it's possible to accidentally push quest items behind objects. However, this mechanic can cause some adverse effects. There are times when items will actually move away from you when you move and tech points can get trapped in the corner of your house without a way to collect them!
- Actions: One neat little trick the developer did was allowing your character to move to the closest item when you press the 'Y' button. However, this doesn't always work the way its supposed to. Sometimes it felt like it prioritized certain things in the area over others. If there was a flower or a mushroom resting behind a tree, my character would "freeze" in place. He would not wisely cut down the tree first. There are quite a few spots this happened, even a spot where a berry bush was unreachable. As a side point, I also hated how you had to wait for a person to situate themselves in their designated spot before being allowed to converse with them.
- Text: Carrying a conversation with someone was smooth most of the time, but every now and then there would be problems with the text. There was a couple of instances where people would continue to talk over the interactive options. There is also a chance you will be stuck listening to the same spill from a person all over again if you aren't careful. There are certain tooltips in the tech trees that get cut off at the bottom of the screen. Another concern of mine is how certain effects aren't completely written out on a lot of items. To list an example, Sermon: Prayer for shoots and roots simply states that it "increases your gardening ability" without describing exactly what that actually entails.
Quality of Life Checks: In a typical game, the option to buy a specific recipe is removed when you purchase or learn the ability. Some games might leave the recipe in and add a notation that tells you that you already know how to use it. Not this game! You can continue buying recipes and using them without ever knowing whether or not you knew them beforehand. This means you must cross-check the recipe with the tech tree beforehand or you will continue to re-learn the same recipe without the game ever telling you. This happens with all recipes - alchemy, cooking, and crafting. It is entirely possible to keep applying peat or fertilizer with no additional effects on the same plot of land too. At least the game prevents you from applying the same embalmer fluid on a body.
Summary
Review: Graveyard Keeper is a messy game that has a lot of problems from all perspectives. There are technical issues, lack of story elements, objects with no practical usefulness, missing information in the UI, sudden difficulty spikes, and unexplained processes. To make matters worse, the developers tried to correct some of these matters through additional content that costs the same amount of the core game. Even after three years, there still persists a large list of unpolished mechanics and annoying bugs. Despite all this, there are still some nice redeeming qualities in experiencing an interesting spin on the building sim genre. The graphics, environment, and setting are all nice to look at. But because of the price and the hindrances people will encounter in the game, I am recommending people to avoid this one.
9-2-2021