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Graveyard Keeper.......Harvest Moon with corpses

orcinator

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 23, 2016
Messages
1,704
Location
Republic of Kongou
The idea of doing creepy shit in a graveyard seems interesting but from everything I've heard most of your time is spent doing regular busywork simulator crap like farming and crafting mundane objects.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...nagement-sim-hampered-by-its-own-complexities

Graveyard Keeper review - a management sim hampered by its own complexities

Arcane busywork leaves little room for genuine pleasure in this fascinating and frustrating genre oddity.


Management simulations have been one of the most enduring video game genres. Whether you like to manage cities, zoos, hospitals or sports teams, there are plenty of riffs on the concept. With the current renaissance of the farming sim however, it's enough to loudly say "Stardew Valley" three times to summon interest - mine included. Graveyard Keeper, then, sounded like the kind of game I didn't know I wanted, something that combines the cute style of a game made in RPG Maker with a truly interesting management idea. It's graveyards. You manage graveyards.

The fun tone is presented as Graveyard Keeper's biggest draw. The game is neither sad nor drab, even though it has you handling dead bodies. Instead, it's likely going for that slightly tongue-in-cheek tone of a Tropico or Dungeon Keeper, asking you to suspend your disbelief and explore all the ways in which you can adapt familiar management mechanics to the theme. In Dungeon Keeper, you build S&M parlours to keep your populace happy, in Graveyard Keeper you...turn dead people into lunchmeat.

To get to that point however, a lot of other things need to happen first. The story is an afterthought: your character gets hit by a car one day and wakes in a different world to a sentient skull pronouncing him the keeper of the local graveyard. Your task is to find a way home, but also to mostly just roll with it. A talking donkey comes by and drops a corpse at your porch, the local bishop tells you to clean up the graveyard, and so you roll up your sleeves and get to it.

Or rather, you would, if only you knew how. Graveyard Keeper shows you how to dig around in a body, how to build a gravesite and where to sell burial certificates for money, and from then on, it stays completely shtum. It took me about five hours to understand its core mechanics, because the game told me what to do, but not how to get there.

jpg

Environments look great, especially when the weather changes.

Your first task is to raise the rating of the graveyard, in other words, to clean it up. The graveyard has a rating, influenced by the materials used to build graves (a gravestone rates higher than a wooden cross, for example) and what condition the buried body is in. You have to reach a certain rating to reopen the church next to the plot. Why you would do that? Because you were told to.

I will concede that normally you don't question why a management sim asks you to do certain things. However, I discovered that I was curiously squeamish about the execution of Graveyard Keeper's central idea. Draining humans of their blood for potions and chucking flailed bodies into the river to make space didn't sit right with me at all, especially due to the laissez faire approach to doing these things. Graveyard Keeper doesn't aspire to be the next A Mortician's Tale, but opening the church could have been used in context, as an example of moving from a questionable practice to the real thing. Instead, you get this strange duality between respecting the dead and turning them into quarter pounders and supplies for spare parts.

Speaking of spare parts: in order to gather almost any material, you will have to learn the corresponding technology, which is just another term for acquiring the necessary knowledge, if you will, and then build the appliance through which your item in question can be created. So far, so - yes - Stardew Valley. To be able to unlock technologies, you have to know about them first. Some of them appear in the technology menu from the beginning, others you'll only know about if someone tells you about them.

jpg

The philosophy of Graveyard Keeper in one image.

Technologies unlock using three different kinds of points. You gain red points for manual labour, green points from farming and blue points for fulfilling tasks that require intelligence, for example proper burial services.

Apart from the graveyard, you get to grow crops and cook food. You can either sell your creations, eat them yourself or hand them over to townsfolk in quests.

Graveyard Keeper's biggest problem is that very few things are intuitive. You meet people in town who ask different things of you, but they hardly explain how you can fulfil their requests. In the instances where they relay information, it can be a lot, but it will never be repeated anywhere.

The merchant, for example, asks to have some vegetables sent to him, but by the time I had gotten them, I had to exit the game and look up when he would return to town. I had forgotten, because an NPC told me this important tidbit about three quests earlier. In another instance, the answer to how to make paper amounts to "you can make it or buy it, I guess."

It's hard to tell if Graveyard Keeper's quest system is purposefully demanding or just a bit hapless. I'm guessing a little column A, a little column B. I'm not against a game with reduced handholding, but no player should feel the need to consult a wiki to learn basic gameplay functions. Once you get there, it can be a lot of fun, albeit for a very specific audience.

There's slight imbalance to the smaller systems, too. You will for example feel like the day is racing on while you're playing, with the day almost always over before your energy is depleted. That in itself isn't a big deal, since you can carry out your shady dealing at any time of day, but while most actions at appliances inform you about their energy cost in points, you don't know how many points your energy bar has. You end up vaguely guessing how much you're actually using.

The map is big and beautiful, but it would be just as effective at maybe half the size, since there's not that much to see. (A teleportation stone has since been patched in)

jpg

You meet a lot of people, mostly for trading purposes.

These points of criticism may sound like nitpicking, but small issues like that can really add up in the long run, especially when some of these design choices seem unnecessary.

Lastly, there's the issue with the quests themselves. I love a good sprawling sidequest, but I have yet to come across a quest in Graveyard Keeper that didn't take me at least three hours to complete it, and that's pushing it. Sometimes this is due to a quest-giver's awkward once-a-week availability, but mostly this happens because you need to grind for technologies and build a whole backyard full of appliances before you can get something done.

This would be interesting for one or two quests, if you had any sense of achievement in the meantime. Instead, it feels like you're always waiting for something.

Graveyard Keeper has been crafted with a loving eye for detail, that's why you get to use every discarded apple core and every feather in some way. It's also just staggeringly imbalanced - it took me almost ten hours to remember I had an actual graveyard to manage.

To compare Graveyard Keeper to Stardew Valley is to reveal where it comes up short. I missed the human warmth, the addictive structure to each day and most of all, being able to do whatever I wanted to. Graveyard Keeper never holds your hand, but it never lets go of it either, since everything you want to do is, at least for the 30 hours I've spent with it, linked to something you need to do first.
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,382
Demoed it for a bit, never played anything in the genre.

The game makes a decent first impression, nice pixel art you get a lot of stuff to explore and do, very little hand-holding.
It starts out small, you, your tiny hut and the graveyard, donkey brings corpses, you pick the good ones to bury, ditch the bad ones into the river, clear the bushes,
shit you do seems to have an actual (visual) impact and the sense of accomplishment is there.
Quickly you get promoted as the keeper of the nearby church, which means you get to redecorate the interior and prepare sermons.
All in all, it expands at a decent pace, each thing you build and unlock opens up new possibilities. When you unlock the church, it provides a steady source of income,
but also calls for new research and resources to upgrade it and make full use of it.

Some of the game's flaws become apparent later on - the game is literally all grinding and waiting for the right moment (some npcs only appear at specific time or day,
and there are areas which were blatantly cut and the devs say they're not coming.
For example, at one point you fork out good money for papers allowing you to access to the town. Once you get there, all giddy about a new area to explore,
you get killed in cutscene and it is explained that you got struck by lightning, and you should stay out of town because it'll just keep happening.
If the story calls for getting items from the town, you ask NPCs to fetch them. Feels a bit ham-fisted.

It's a casual game through and through - doesnt seem it's actually possible to lose, at worst you can dig yourself into a hole which will take a while to crawl out from because you rushed things too much.
If you, for example, ignore farming, you'll find yourself locked out of a good portion of the game, until you backtrack and set everything up.
The 'challenge' is in finding efficient ways to do things and deciding what actually matters and plan what to do to keep the game going forward.

There is a surprising amount of depth, but it takes grind to unlock. For example, it is possible to really take your time preparing corpses for burial, carefully removing blood, fat and organs and adding various embalming fluids
to get as high quality rating as possible, but it's all locked behind lots and lots of research for embalming, not to mention you also need high quality gravestones to really make use of that quality corpse.
It's not a big deal, as the game is quite forgiving. If you misbury a corpse, exhumation permits are quite easy to come by.

Aside from grinding, the game offers a bit of dialogue and quests, they are mostly about delivering specific products with specific quality. The protagonist is a contemporary guy thrown into a middle-ages setting so there's a bit of humorous play on that theme.
There's also a dungeon which you can explore, scavenge stuff and kill monsters. The game's biggest appeal is in the morbid theme, but other than that it feels a bit unpolished to me.

The game also has alchemy with a good number of useful stuff that can be made. I ended up looking up the recipes, as I couldn't see myself finding them out by trial and error.

As I got closer to what appears to be the endgame, I get the feeling that the tedium really starts to get too much. Not only you need to worry about crafting rare stuff (thankfully, you can take shortcuts by earning and spending large amounts money) but also manage different timetables - some npcs are only available on specific days of the week, and if you miss them you have to wait till next week.
 
Last edited:

Agesilaus

Antiquity Studio
Patron
Developer
Joined
Aug 24, 2013
Messages
4,456
Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Played it for a bit, just didn't see the point. Maybe I'll try it again one day in the distant future, but it seems to be a very dull and uninspiring game.
 

Stavrophore

Most trustworthy slavic man
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Aug 17, 2016
Messages
12,612
Location
don't identify with EU-NPC land
Strap Yourselves In
Its way worse than stardew valley, much more grind.You constantly have no energy, even making food isnt cutting it. Maybe if you are in late game, then it isnt a problem, but when you are in late game, then you must've been suffering to get there ;)
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
Some of the game's flaws become apparent later on - the game is literally all grinding and waiting for the right moment (some npcs only appear at specific time or day,
and there are areas which were blatantly cut and the devs say they're not coming.
For example, at one point you fork out good money for papers allowing you to access to the town. Once you get there, all giddy about a new area to explore,
you get killed in cutscene and it is explained that you got struck by lightning, and you should stay out of town because it'll just keep happening.
If the story calls for getting items from the town, you ask NPCs to fetch them. Feels a bit ham-fisted.
Damn, was kinda looking forward to this after it got a full release. Sounds like a classic case of the devs moving on after getting the youtube/streaming sales bump and not giving a fuck since they sold what they needed to.
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,382
Yeah, I've read people complain the game didn't progress since alpha when it comes to the map.

At this point I'm mostly sitting it out just for completion's sake. Buying into aristocracy to progress the main quest requires a so much money it feels very tedious (and that's saying much for a schlepping simulator like this).
I'm finding the balance in the late game to be pretty crappy. No matter what I do, I cannot find any gold nuggets for the last few crafting recipes. Seems like apart from the veins in the dungeon it's entirely random.
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,382
So I finished it. Like I said, the endgame was a mess and the ending itself was a bit of a letdown. There isn't really any branching and you need to bring all the storylines to their conclusions to beat the game.
Biggest slog was the quest to gain Aristocrat Papers, 12 gold pieces takes a lot of grind (to put that into perspective, you get 1 silver coin and 30 coppers for a successful burial, 100 silver coins make for a gold piece),
and the game really does a good job at not letting you waltz past it. When I tried to dump all my valuable stuff on vendors (and they only buy some of the stuff),
the price dropped with each sale, which would lose me money. So, best strategy is to sell 1-2 items, then wait for the trader to reset.
Even with a decently pimped church and graveyard, it took a while. I tried to speed it up a bit by merchant trading, but it requires hauling crates across half the map, which is very tedious.
The game really suffers by requiring you to do everything yourself, with little automation for repeatable tasks.

Combat is pretty uninspired, but it can be a welcome break from schlepping. You have a roguelikey dungeon with a bunch of enemies (though there are really four types with different attack patterns).
You get to go through 15 levels of dungeons which all look the same and quickly become boring. You still have to go all the way through it, as it is required to get the endgame item. It's possible to skip it by paying gold,
but it was such an absurd amount I decided to just go along with the fighting. Not to mention, there are some rare materials that only appear in the dungeon.
And you can't really skip dungeon levels, as it won't let you go down a staircase until you've killed all enemies.
All in all, combat wasn't really much of a challenge. I never felt the need to get the best weapon, nor use the combat blessings. Not to mention, you can't really die in this game.

My biggest gripe about the endgame is that you need to wait for a specific day to talk to different important NPCs. I managed to take some brunt off the bothersome waiting by swinging the sword untile exhausted and going to sleep,
which is the closest to fast forwarding the time you can do in this game. Still, it's a bother when you need to deliver a book to the astrologer, wait a week for him to process it, then come back again to learn that he wants another book.
If you don't look shit up on the wiki and prepare the stuff needed for quests in advance, you're bound to lose a lot of time.

Story wise, I wasn't too impressed
All questlines are basically a rehash of the "let's bring the long lost family member together", which was quite nice for the first time, but quickly lost it's appeal when it repeated itself for the third time. I reckon the writer wanted to make
it the central theme of the game, but managed to overdo it. The ending also left a bad taste in my mouth with the "comic relief" characters breaking the fourth wall and quipping that it's a shame they didn't let us into the town,
it'll probably come out as a DLC. Not to mention, it was a bit confusing. The main character is supposedly dead and is looking for a way to go back to his love. In the end, its the woman who steps through the portal to meet him and they kiss without explaining anything.
Given the setup for the game (it's established you're not the first graveyard keeper, and previous one or ones left through the portal), I'd expect a bit of explaining here. Or maybe the ending was just cobbled together in a rush, yeah, I'll go with that.

So what's the verdict? The game's got a decent early game, there is a sense of accomplishment as you unlock all the map and begin to feel comfortable getting all the businesses running, but starts to drop off as you approach the end, which really overstays its welcome.
Given the grindy nature, the game is most likely intended for Germans with a penchant for the morbid. Normal people should best stay away. If you are still interested, it's a game that's quite good at wasting your time, so be prepared to take it slow, accept that
you'll eventually need to try and do everything in the game and don't try to rush things. Things will open up at their own leisurely pace.
 

Ezeekiel

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 19, 2016
Messages
1,783
Shame about this one. I hope their graphics/artist people jump ship and join an outfit which doesn't suck at gameplay design (if such a thing exists in 2018).
 

Fowyr

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Mar 29, 2009
Messages
7,671
So I finished it. Like I said, the endgame was a mess and the ending itself was a bit of a letdown. There isn't really any branching and you need to bring all the storylines to their conclusions to beat the game.
Biggest slog was the quest to gain Aristocrat Papers, 12 gold pieces takes a lot of grind (to put that into perspective, you get 1 silver coin and 30 coppers for a successful burial, 100 silver coins make for a gold piece),
and the game really does a good job at not letting you waltz past it. When I tried to dump all my valuable stuff on vendors (and they only buy some of the stuff),
the price dropped with each sale, which would lose me money. So, best strategy is to sell 1-2 items, then wait for the trader to reset.
Even with a decently pimped church and graveyard, it took a while. I tried to speed it up a bit by merchant trading, but it requires hauling crates across half the map, which is very tedious.
Wine sells for a lot of bucks, there are unending flow of silver from sermons, you can easily transport two merchant's crates at once using short tunnel under your house or use teleport stone to move one crate instantly. There are a lot of silver ingots in the dungeon to sell, there is a gold to sell to Miss Charm as jewelry. There are witch burnings after all! Fuck, game is grindy, but it's not too grindy. Energy problems are overrated as well. You don't even fucking need to pay for town pass in the first place, Snake gives you it after just one or two quests.
Dark humour was top notch. I don't think that I will replay it, but overall it's a cute little game.
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,382
There were no teleport stones in the version I played, but looking it up on the wiki, it seems to help with some of the tedium.
I considered making a macro to take me to the lighthouse and back at one point, so I guess the devs recognized the problem here.

Regarding crates, I made a fucking crate train, pressing them against the wall in the basement to schlepp 5 at once, and I still think it was too grindy for the pay-off. Depends on the kind of tolerance you have for this shit, perhaps.
My point was, the game failed to pick up the pace, as it should near the end.
 

Ezeekiel

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 19, 2016
Messages
1,783
So there is a free DLC/update out on steam for this, which gives you the ability to raise zombie workers to do a lot of stuff for you.
Crafting, taking care of the garden, selling stuff etc. You can upgrade them with better organs, according to steam.


So less grind/tedium now, I guess.

Problem is, isn't the grind most of what the game has to offer in the first place?
Well, maybe it's worth revisiting for interested parties.
 

Perkel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
15,810
Ok guys tried it and it is fucking 10/10. GET IT. This is basically at level of Stardew Valley. I can't believe just how much they improved game since i tried it in early access. Back then it was pretty meh.

Pros:
- legit good humor
- you make out of corpses food and stuff
- there is whole other harvest moon aspect other than corpses
- quest chain is much more robust and imho better than SD
- good artstyle
- good worldbuilding
- way better balanced than SD or HM
- love that they get rid of hard "days" and game just flows.

cons:
- some annoying UI choice when farming

Game does start rather slow but imho looking back at it, it is a plus due to how game is packed with different things.
 

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