Graveyard Keeper (2018)

• Playtime: 4h44m

• Played: 2026

• Context: I like the idea of farm life sims, but the execution is often lacking. Basegame only.

Review

Graveyard Keeper takes the typical "you inherited a farm" concept and adds a twist - you have to maintain a graveyard and church. It's a fun concept and initially it is amusing. For example, you can remove flesh from a corpse during autopsy, cook and eat it.

But quickly enough the grind hits. It's the typical you need X machine to make Y thing, except they overdo it to the point where it isn't fun. You need materials. You need machines to process them and products. And you need research points to unlock everything. It takes hours to even be able to do basic stuff.

And it gets so much worse. The "medium" level research requires tech points. You get those by killing bats, turning their wings into paper and processing these using faith points. And you can only get faith points once per week, and to get more you have to grind to build up your church. It took 4-4,5 hours to even get to the point where i got my first tech points.

Now you may be wondering, what about the story? Do you talk to villagers? What about exploration? Mines? First of all, there is only a few lines of story. There is no dialogue outside of quests. You basically don't interact with villagers. There's a small-medium area that you can walk through, but there is nothing there except for a handful of quest givers. I think there are mines, but i hadn't unlocked those yet.

So basically Graveyard Keeper lacks most of the things that make farm life sims fun, severely limits your freedom to do what you want and forces you into an obnoxious grind. And for what?

I picked up Graveyard Keeper on impulse, wanting to try something new. Cohh had played it extensively and seemed to enjoy it, which sparked my curiosity. I thought that if I was not playing Stardew Valley, this might be a suitable alternative.

In practice, it feels largely like a darker imitation of Stardew Valley. Its central gimmick—managing corpses and engaging in morally questionable tasks—is amusing at first and gives it a distinctive tone. However, beyond that hook, it lacks the depth, warmth, and cohesion that make Stardew Valley compelling.

Technically, the Switch version struggles. Performance is uneven, with noticeable slowdowns that make the experience feel sluggish. It is not catastrophically buggy, but it does not run as smoothly as expected for a title of this scope. At times, the system feels as though it is straining under unnecessary load.

After a few hours, the novelty wore off. It is not a terrible game, but it declines quickly in appeal. Ultimately, if you are looking for this style of experience, Stardew Valley remains the stronger choice. Graveyard Keeper does not offer enough to justify choosing it instead.

I found this game a lot of fun for someone who never plays management sim games. I loved the mechanics, the communist donkey, and the overall concept.

That being said, I do have some issues with it. For a game that requires so much walking back and forth into town, it takes so. long. to do it. Some of the mechanics were very confusing, I found myself spending more time on the wiki figuring out how to do things rather than playing the game itself. The game is also very repetitive, but that might just be the style of the game itself. As I said, I don't play management sims very often.

Overall, I do love it, but I also haven't touched it in multiple months.

Just got this game and from the start i began getting stutters at irregular intervals.

This obviously ruins the game experience and looking around, stutters has not been uncommon on console.

So i can't say i recommend getting the game.

As of the point of writing this, i have yet to get a refund on the game. But refunding eShop games is not something Nintendo do, in fact they make you agree that your right to do so is voided when you buy games.

It took me a long while to even consider trying it but now I have been hooked with Graveyard Keeper for nearly a week. And this comes from someone who isn't a big fan of crafting-based games. It's getting reminiscent to Runescape, though this is single-player.

The "carrot" of this game for me is the story, the amalgam of quests, the character backgrounds, the sense of progression through crafting and upgrading; all imbued to this addictive game like in form of alchemy. Even the humor on top adds the charm to it.

Yesterday, a friend of mine just finished the game after 38 hours (we both usually don't play games with such dedication). I've already put at least half into it, so I hope the steam lasts until the end.

This game was really a complex balancing act and a spreadsheet, with a ho-hum graphics and a funny premise....and I liked it a lot.

Overall, there's not a lot new or innovative about it, but the loop really got it's hooks into me.

The ending is anticlimactic, but even all of these things that are seemingly negative and I really enjoyed my time with the game. It may not sound like a glowing review, but all the same, the game was a fun bunch of hours and I don't regret it one bit.

~David.

A lot of lost potential but not a terrible game overall.

Graveyard keeper is a 2d pixel art game much in the style of Stardew Valley. And while it tries to be as fun it fails with being overcomplicated in some points and too shallow in others. What's worse is that it fails to capture a similar atmosphere as Stardew had. There's no similar sense of community and because of it you dont really care for any of the characters.

Visually it's looking good. Even very good at times. However it does suffer from fps drops even on quite performant pc which is a bit unexpected for such a game. It's not constant so it can be ignored for the most part.

The soundtrack gets annoying pretty quickly and had to actually turn it off.

So what's the game like. In a lot of ways it's Stardew Valley on steroids. I always wanted more options, more buildings, more production trees options and after playing graveyard keeper i'm not sure if I actually would like that. My feel for graveyard keeper is mostly lack of focus. You've got like 20 active quests to pursue, each require your time and I was always trying to do all at once. Since all require a lot of crafting, collecting etc I had no idea what im doing for the most part. And that's until I had only one and there was too much time to fill between days on meaningless labour.

The game gives you a lot to do, but unfortunately a lot of it is pretty shallow and morally insane. So first and foremost you're a graveyard keeper. You take the dead and bury them into graves. You can also burn them. Or you can simply toss them into river. No questions asked or repercussions involved. What's more you can prepare the body before burying by removing flesh, fat, and other organs. You can then cook the flesh and make tasty burgers. The game doesn't even try to acknowledge that fact - it's perfectly normal in the game world. You can make good fertilizer from the burned ashes… For that the character you control who wants to return to his loved one just feels soulless and empty.

You'll also get to burn witches. At least assist in it and provide a buffet to go along with it - yes, the tasty burgers. You'll also run a garden, explore some dungeons, run the church as a priest, do some cooking, do some fishing, dabble with alchemy, raise some zombies to do work for you and run a lot of fetch quests through the game.

And that sounds like a lot to do but most of it doesn't feel great, just good. The fishing for example, looking a lot like Stardew Valley but it's just not as fun even though it adds a bit of twist by giving you percentages based on lure. But the minigame while almost same is just not as fun. And it's like that with everything. The farming seems not as fun as stardew valley, dungeon exploring as well.

What's good though is the tech tree and a lot to unlock and craft. It's sometimes a bit overwhelming and hard to remember what resources you need for particular things and there's no easy way of looking it up so there was a lot of walking for forgotten things.

You get experience by doing anything and its nicely done by splitting experience points into areas. Certain actions generate certain experience points although it could do with a little bit more balancing as the blue or spiritual experience is so hard to come by and essential to unlocking a lot of things.

Overall I have mixed feelings about the game. Enjoyed the beginning although was feeling a bit overwhelmed. The lack of depth started to show somewhere mid game where there was more and more meaningless grinding. And hated the end game when I just pushed through to be done with it. A hesitant recommendation at best if the word grind does not scare you away.