Graveyard Keeper

Developer: Lazy Bear Games

Graveyard Keeper feels like a game that happens when the intrusive thoughts win. What happens if you let a random guy in a morally loose town take care of the dead?

Running a farm has been done; it’s time to take tedium and capitalism to the church. This might be one of the most self-aware games ever made. It’s also very dark-humoured, and not shy with its commentary. A 2D, top-down, pixel art, management sim, with, yes, some farming. You’d be forgiven for making the parallels to Stardew Valley, but that would be a very superficial view to take. A lot of what you’ll be doing is focussed not on the tiny farm area, but on taking care of your very own graveyard. How did you get there? The same way everyone else does.

So our MC gets hit by a car - not as fun as it sounds. Instead of winding up 6ft under, they find themselves in a medieval-style world, then quickly roped into taking care of the local church and associated land. Next, you’ll meet a very talkative, communist donkey (stay with me), who’s happy to deliver your bodies for a small fee. Now it’s up to you to take care of these poor souls (although care is largely up to you to define). Burial, cremation? All valid options. Or you could throw them in the river if you don’t have time. The more business-minded among you might even consider feeding the locals at a nominal cost. Where you get the meat from, however, is between you and the chatty skull in the mortuary.

I warned you the humour was dark.

Our goal is to get back to our time, and there’s a very nice portal that can get us there. The problem is it’s deactivated and we need items to start it up again. This means we need to make friends, and those friends need things.

There are a lot of other activities to take up your time when you’re not ‘caring’ for the dead. Farming, sure, but as stated, there’s not a lot of it. And even then you can’t just throw all your produce in a convenient shipping bin and have a nice shopkeeper from town come to collect it every night. No, you’re going to need to build shipping crates for each type of produce, which means you’re going to need wood, and metal for the nails. You’re also going to want your churchyard to look nice with fancy headstones and monuments, so stone and marble are needed. No free food either, so you’re going to need to put a chef’s hat on. Potion crafting, sermons, pottery. Yeah, there are a lot of side activities, and you aren’t going to have time to do it all quickly. 

Unfortunately, there is a lot of unavoidable drudgery, at least in the base game. There’s also a skill tree to work through. You collect different types of experience for doing different tasks - red, green, blue. If you learn which activities give the most experience reward of a type, you can quickly learn to exploit the system and burn through upgrades fast. Upgrades mean more resource gathering, which means more upgrades, which means more gathering. Rinse and repeat.

There are currently 4 DLCs. The first, Breaking Dead, it’s arguably the most useful, because it adds resurrection. Are too many side hustles taking up your day? You need zombies. Lots of zombies. No one is asking what you’re doing with the bodies dumped on your door, so feel free to put them to work. Mindless drones, who will do exactly what you say, and can be easily replaced with better, faster workers later. If you thought the capitalist commentary was subtle before, you’re not ready for this.

The second DLC, Stranger Sins, adds more endgame story. It also adds a tavern so you can make better use of the produce from your farm. The third, Game of Crone, brings a refugee camp for you to build and help with, along with a story about vampires. And the final DLC, Better Save Soul, allows you to delve into the lives of the corpses, and help their tarnished souls.

In reality, it doesn’t matter when you add the DLC, as it all integrates into the game rather nicely. Personally, I would recommend adding it all at once. Whilst it might seem like a lot of extra stuff to add to your already large activity pile, you’re not forced to rush through any of it. At the very least you’re going to be happy to have the first because the zombies can cut down on a lot of the tedium mid-game.

Graveyard Keeper can be repetitive, doesn’t always explain what you need to do, and you can find yourself doing a lot of running around and waiting. And yet, I can’t help but recommend it. It requires a slightly odd sense of humour. It’s quirky, dark, and satirical. It’s a strange type of fun. But fun nonetheless.