• 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?

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.