I’ve dug a lot of graves in my time and Graveyard Keeper from Lazy Bear Games is probably the most fun I’ve had doing it! That’s not a joke. I actually used to dig graves for a living for a couple of years in the early nineties. Seriously. We used a backhoe, but I did all the finish work with a shovel and a pick-axe, just like the main character in Graveyard Keeper. It’s even possible that I may have encountered a similar situation or two to the ones in the game, but if I have, I’m certain I can’t recall it. And none to do with cannibalism, so no harm, no foul, right? I can confirm, however, that Graveyard Keeper isn’t utterly faithful to the grave-digging experience. You don’t end up with your legs covered in water filled with rotten corpse meat from a collapsing grave or accidentally almost get buried alive (these are absolutely things that did happen to me). You don’t get sunburned from tending to the graves and bushes or have allergy-induced asthma attacks from the weeds in the empty field next door either. But you do have fun!
Graveyard Keeper is a darkly comic farming/tending simulator much in the vein of Stardew Valley. In fact, it rather closely resembles Chucklefish’s spectacular release from 2016. But the resemblance is in the mechanics, not in the game itself. Most farming sims tend to use similar mechanics, such as tilling, planting, day and night, and town interaction. Graveyard Keeper is no exception to this, only it adds to the recipe with a rather unique twist. You have, quite suddenly, become a Graveyard Keeper. Your mission is to make the graveyard a pleasant place to spend an afterlife, and make the graveyard profitable as well. If you do a good job, well…I don’t want to ruin the story here, because honestly, it’s not incredibly long and I thought it rather clever. Suffice it to say the game grabs you with a bit of interesting plot right off the bat, and then actually makes you want to tend your graveyard. It’s certainly an excellent start to what looks to be a complex and involving game.
With a little help from a friendly talking skull named Gerry, a talking donkey with an oddly Socialist perspective, and a rather narcissistic Bishop, you learn the basic ropes of the game, digging into (yeah, I went there) graveyard maintenance and what to do to make a little money on the side. If you have a bit of a twisted sense of humor, it’s excellent. If you stop at red lights in Grand Theft Auto V and return incorrect change at restaurants, this might not be the game for you. It’s morbid, it’s amusing, it’s disturbing, and it’s occasionally gross. But all those things just make it endearing. However, it’s not all roses in the cemetery flower garden.
I like this game. I really do. I enjoy the comic mischief. I enjoy the dark nods to medieval history. But Graveyard Keeper also has a downside, and that’s tedium. One of the more common gameplay elements of this type of management sim is an energy bar for your character. And your energy bar is woefully short. I haven’t finished the game yet, and there may be some ways to overcome this. There are foods and energy drinks that renew your energy bar in the game, but ultimately your energy bar runs out extremely quickly. So quickly that it’s actually rather irritating. You’ll start to clear brush away, get through about 4 bushes, and you need to go home to sleep for the night to replenish your energy. Swell. You’ll accidentally hit a wrong button and swing your sword. More energy gone. It doesn’t slowly refill either, even though it should. Stop what you’re doing, walk slowly (so slowly) all the way home, rest, then walk back to where you were working and continue. Oh, your shovel wore out. Go back home to the grindstone and fix it. Wait, that takes more energy. Now you’re out again. Time to rest. The speed at which the energy bar depletes is a game-crippling issue, as is the speed at which your tools wear out to a lesser degree. And the days go by fast. So fast that you can barely get anything done during a day, and you can only talk to certain key NPCs on certain days of the week. Considering that you have to travel all the way to the surprisingly large and populous Village, and later even further to the Town, that’s certainly a tall order! Grr. With all the mining, smithing, fishing, planting, grave digging, organ harvesting, skullduggery, witch burning, and other assorted hi-jinks you need to get done, it’s going to take a lot of sleeping to get there! Get those pillows ready!
Aside from the brutal energy mechanics, it’s also quite difficult to get blue spiritual points for researching all your techniques to perform autopsies, make more elaborate graves, build and farm. Points come in red (physical), green (natural) and blue (spiritual). You’ll burn them fast, and you’ll be doing a lot of sleeping to do it. It’s a bit of a grind overall, and there’s definitely no hand-holding in this one. It took me quite some time to figure out where to get maggots to make peat for my flower beds and hunt down seeds to grow in my garden, for example. I won’t deny I got frustrated more than a few times.
Ever after taking all that into consideration, the game is still quite fun and entertaining though. It’s also a joy to look at. While all the graphics are rendered in a 16-bit style, the detail level is excellent. Fine detail abounds with swaying plants, footprints in the mud, and a plethora of tiny animations that make Graveyard Keeper come alive (no, I haven’t seen any zombies yet, I just couldn’t resist). The energy put into the graphic design of the game was excellent and it holds up across the board. The interface mechanics leave a bit more to be desired however. If you’re playing this game on the PC, you definitely owe it to yourself to get a controller.
I attempted to play with the keyboard initially, but the default key bindings, which can be mapped, are definitely not the greatest. Lazy Bear obviously intended the game to be played with a modern controller. I found the Xbox One controller worked very well with Windows 10 on Graveyard Keeper, and the default key bindings on the controller are pleasantly intuitive. The game did however crash for me in the Review Beta that I’m playing. I had four crashes to the desktop in the first hour I played the game. The game didn’t close, it just kicked me to my desktop where I had to click on the icon to get back into the game right where I left off. I’ve seen worse in beta versions before, so I really can’t complain as I never saw any other glitches. Graveyard Keeper is also available on Xbox One (no idea how it runs there though), and is free to try on Xbox Game Pass if you have it, so give it a shot!
Ultimately, the game is fun but flawed. I’m hoping there will be an update that addresses the energy system in the near future, as it’s pretty much a game-breaker, but other than that, as long as you’re willing to put in a little extra effort, it will pay off in the form of a fun, quirky, sometimes disturbing game! Any Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon fan will feel right at home here. If you have the time and patience, I highly recommend Graveyard Keeper. It certainly brought me back to the days I spent 6 feet under (and yes, you actually dig graves at least 6 feet deep whenever possible, sometimes even a bit deeper). So pick up your pick-axe and get to work, people! Those corpses won’t bury themselves! And I’m retired from the business, so don’t come asking me to hide your bodies!
A Beta Review copy of Graveyard Keeper was provided for the purposes of this review. This review was based on the Steam version of Graveyard Keeper, running on an I7-8700K with 16 GB of DDR4-3000 RAM and an Asus GeForce GTX 1080 ROG Strix graphics card. The second image in this review is from the official Graveyard Keeper website, all others are screen captures from actual gameplay.