You have a few repair materials in your graveyard chest. You bring the corpse to the graveyard and the Bishop meets you there, telling you that your graveyard is a mess and a bunch of decorations need repairs.He also requests a beer from town, which tells you that you can have quests and different levels of friendliness with NPCs, all of which is tracked in a sub-menu.Wait, what? Gerry tells you to remove a chunk of flesh, because it’s valuable and the bartender in town might want it. You bring the corpse into the morgue and Gerry tells you about the autopsy process, during which you can add and remove body parts.Alright, cool, the donkey drops off corpses and they need to be dealt with. You meet the donkey, who drops off a corpse.The skull is actually a talking skull named Gerry and tells you about a donkey you need to meet.This teaches you about waypoints, then teaches you that you can interact with things using the Y button. You’re initially tasked with digging up a skull.(Image: Jake Vander Ende / KnowTechie)Īnyway, you’re taught so many things in rapid succession, it’s a systems whirlwind that’s hard not to get completely absorbed, whatever the motivation. There’s a display glitch here where text sometimes shows up outside of its box, which I wanted to share, but was ultimately not that important because it was only some of the time and rarely affected gameplay. How can you care all that much about decorating your graveyard and improving its quality if you don’t want to be there in the first place? Still, the feeling is different and that’s good news for players who’ve played hundreds of hours of other games like this and need a change of pace. I’m torn about how I feel about that underlying motivator, because the game clearly wants you to get absorbed in its mechanics and systems, but at the same time you’re supposed to be rallying against them. It’s a major emotional difference from other games like it because the point of those other games is that you do want to leave your old life behind. That said, in Graveyard Keeper, your character does not want to leave that life behind and the whole game centers around getting back somehow – if that’s even possible. Sure, both games are about leaving the life you know behind to live a new life elsewhere, which is the metagame of what you the player are doing when you get into the routine here. ![]() ![]() The obvious comparison here is Stardew Valley, with which this game shares a lot of design DNA, but that motivator makes things fundamentally different Side note: If this game actually just ended right there and was a $19.99 PSA about not texting while crossing the street, holy shit that would be some incredible avant-garde ART. The game opens with a brief cinematic where you profess your enjoyment for a modest, simple life shared with someone you love, only to get hit by a car while you’re texting. Graveyard Keeperis devilishly designed and it’s one of those games where tugging at one mechanic leads to two more. ![]() It’s a strangely lovely, oddly beautiful game, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with it, and here’s how that went. ![]() Tasked with maintaining the grounds, handling the dead bodies, leading sermons in the church, and more, all you’re really trying to do is get back to your wife from before the car accident. It’s a game that starts off with you dying, only to wake up and find that you’re the newly appointed keeper of the graveyard in a medieval-era town that may or may not actually be purgatory. The first time I sat down with Graveyard Keeper (developed by Lazy Bear Games and published by tinyBuild), two hours just plain disappeared.
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