Graveyard Keeper Review

Graveyard keeper is a game similar to Harvest Moon(Or more recently Stardew Valley), giving you a small home and a vaguely defined objective to go and do stuff. Graveyard keeper is different in a few ways however, with more strongly defined quests and goals and an interesting medieval ish setting in which you are in charge of a graveyard, and the surrounding area.

While at first overwhelming with everything to do and days passing quickly, it is mainly a relaxed game where you do not have deadlines or a need to rush anything. Take as long as you want, the days will cycle and soon you'll get another chance. There is a lot to do, especially early on, but you can do it in any order, at your own pace, and in however many sessions you want. It makes sure to balance things out in such a way that the initial experience and middle game is excellent, which makes Graveyard Keeper at first seem like a gem. It has a lot of content, especially for the price, and a lot of thought has gone into making everything work right.

But of course, not everything is perfect. The game practically expects you to do immoral things to corpses, and does not react differently if you do not. At one point you will end up needing to grind up money, as the mid game does not go amazingly well into the later game, and alchemy is trial-and-error, without hints or systems on how to figure out which combination does what. With several hundreds and perhaps even a thousand or more possible combinations of ingredient- Some of which difficult to gather, expensive, or limited by time...And all lost when you try a combination that doesn't work, you will want a guide for alchemy or you're going to need to try every single combination one at a time.
A few areas are empty or inaccessible, somewhat large parts of the story/background are never quite resolved and a lot of things are slow and need quality of life improvements to not be a pain in the ass. The graveyard keeping itself is simple and can be ignored most of the time, they're not going anywhere anyway. It feels as though they ran out of time or funding to do all these things they had planned, and still tried their best. I would say it is still a gem, but after time you will notice that not everything is as amazing as it first seemed.

All that said, if you have enough patience to deal with the rough sections, are okay with some mild imperfections, and don't mind if your graveyard keeping experience is more along the lines of a farmer-smith-woodworker-miner-alchemist than about keeping graves, then Graveyard Keeper is a great game and very much worth the asking price.