Graveyard Keeper

I tried to like it but this was a very tedious game. The game loop does not do it for me.

I do not usually write reviews, but this was just such a fascinating experience that I wanted to put my thoughts out there. I bought this (long) after seeing it played by Many A True Nerd on YouTube. The opinion on that video was that the energy cost of all actions was frustratingly high and there was just too much faff (build A to craft B to process C so that you can make a new bed, etc.). This led me to buy the game with my eyes open, knowing it had some flaws, but it was on sale, I was feeling good for it, and here we are. Full disclosure, I often love this kind of tedium in games. For me, that process is a perfectly satisfactory form of progression, so long as I really want the final product goal. In Graveyard Keeper, I really enjoyed watching the quality of the graves go up, scoping out new crafting stations, processing materials, and being tantalized with the possibility of raising the dead to do some of the grindy bits for me. However, after a point, the amount of grind needed to facilitate the numbers going up became a bit more than I wanted. I touched up some graves here and there, but there were some strange choices in mechanics that I found frustrating, such as how all tools can be repaired except for chisels, which must simply be crafted anew, and are necessary to make polished stones. The game gives you copious amounts of freedom. Rather than having a single path I was grinding down, I meandered, doing a bit of what was interested, getting distracted, moving over to something else. I felt like I was always making some form of progress through this strange, macabre little world (though sprucing up the graveyard and the church was still the best fun). [b]This game tutorializes players minimally about some mechanics. [/b] At the beginning of the game, I enjoyed that. The game "trusted" me to figure it out on my own and it was reasonably rewarding to do so. However, I did start to notice cracks from the beginning. A ghost appears to tell you how to dump bodies in the river by asking you to dig up someone's grave because he didn't like the guy. I just ignored this, and the specific grave listed by the ghost was never marked anywhere. There was no way to check the dialogue or instructions. Similarly, some of the mechanics related to preparing corpses for burial could have been better explained (I passed over the red vs. white skulls for a bit). I started to have problems with the game after I made a few zombies and automated by basic resources (iron, stone, wood). I unlocked a technology for preserving bodies, improving their quality for burial or for undead labor. Unfortunately, I was able to unlock this technology LONG before I was able to make the starting ingredients for the preservation liquid! There was no indication of where to get the base materials for the preservation liquid other than a note to use the alchemy bench. This brings us to ALCHEMY. The alchemy system in this game had some interesting potential, but ultimately does not respect player time. There is a solid sprinkling of game logic into the alchemy system, regarding which substances can combine to make something useful (like preservative!) and which only produce goo. However, the logic is not complete and, unless some random townsperson was interested in explaining a pattern that they learned in the university, there was simply no in-game way to determine the recipes other than a full brute-force approach, which includes brute-forcing a three-digit code of different elements and substances. The time it would have taken me to get what I wanted (healthy, glue-filled corpses) is larger than I cared to imagine. This was when I started cooling on the game. The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was decorating/improving the church. I built a wall candle, but was unable to place it in any of the "suggested" places (they did not quite fit). I know the game is rough, and I assumed that this was just some kind of oversight and didn't think too much of it. Then, in my last hurrah, I summoned all of my resources, built the materials for two stained glass windows, and went to install them in my church. It was here that I found that THEY ALSO HAD NO VIABLE LOCATIONS. Instead, a bit of googling revealed that the church needed to be upgraded to the next tier before stained glass could be placed, and even then, only one stained glass window would be installed. I had unlocked the stained glass and spent a lot of focused time aiming for these windows only to learn that I had unlocked them far earlier than they were truly relevant to the game. No tooltip suggested that these belonged in the cathedral level, and the building station in the church happily told me I had all the right materials! There were just too many odd or sloppy design choices for me to continue the game. If you've bothered to read this far, I will be totally honest, I had a great time with most of this game. It let me turn off my grindy little brain, and it had no serious plot, so I didn't feel like I was really missing anything by ignoring some people I found uninteresting. If you buy this, I wish you an excellent experience; Just know what it is you're getting, and you'll be happy with it. Expect something more polished and complete and you'll be livid.

If I'm being honest, I found the idea of this game intriguing. I like fairly morbid things and after trying the Traveler's Rest game, I had really high hopes for this. But I was almost immediately let down. Not just in comparison to Traveler's Rest, which tops this game in terms of design, graphics and story, but just in general! It's set in a small all-white town, all the women characters are posed as "simple" or "seductive" (with most falling under the 'simple' category) with little in terms of character development or intrigue. You're "allowed" to make certain choices but the main character will stay determined to go home to his wife and kids you've heard ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about and there's a lot of mechanics that you have to wander around trying to figure out because none of it is explained. There are also quests and you're supposed to have a board with all the characters and your quests related to them but the notes are so vague and some of them don't appear at all. Which I'd be okay-ish with if this were in-progress but this is a finished game? The building mechanics are also awkward. You can't really tell exactly how big things are going to be until you're definitely placing them down to build and then you can't pick them up and move them, you have to destroy them and get new materials to rebuild in a new (hopefully better) position. (The visuals also get so dark sometimes and it is genuinely difficult to see what's on screen!) The church is very basic and repetitive. It repeats the same scene almost every time, even with different prayers and all the townspeople can say of the church is that they hate sinners who bring about things like magic and such, they hate the poor who live in the little all white town, they hate graveyard keepers like ourselves and witches. There's not much in terms of actual building or interesting mechanics there, which is disappointing. I hate church but I'd still be interested in actual mechanics involving it! Which brings us to the zombies. I was so excited about the prospect of alchemy in the game but when they introduce it, it's so clear that the biggest "purpose" of alchemy in the game is to create zombies, which the game literally presents as "ethical slaves." I cannot emphasize how much I do not want to enslave people, "ethically" or not. At no point in my life have I ever asked myself, "Why don't they have games with ethical slavery? Someone should get on that." At no point have I ever wanted to bring people back to life in my Breaking Bad-ass church backroom just so that I can enslave them to do infinite labor for me until they die again. What type of Confederate knockoff manifestos were the devs reading? 'Cause that's what its giving. I want to mess around with magic, I want to grow and build some ♥♥♥♥, I want to serve some customers; I do not want to own slaves in some creepy all-white town with next-to-no women. And don't get me started on the Roma people in the game. It's an all-white town except for the "traveling heathen" that is a Roma guy who camps in town, whose sister might be scheduled to be burnt as a witch or something. Except of course, they use a slur for Roma and it's a complete caricature but surely that says nothing about the game designers. 🙄 The most frustrating aspect is that the game has potential. The skill tree is so well-designed, the fighting is an awesome aspect (actually exciting, very good addition!), the alchemy is just as complicated and vague as I wanted it to be, there's so much to do and yet the story again and again falls short! So many of the mechanics are awkward as ♥♥♥♥ and unexplained (don't get me started on the fishing!) and so much of it is just monotonous as ♥♥♥♥. So no, I do not recommend it. It's a waste of money (and time).

Figure it out simulator

The game is slightly interesting, but it feels very grindy in a bad way, and feels a bit aimless. It also lacks a lot of quality of life, so it is really awkward to play. The quests are very difficult to figure out, because there's not a real quest log. There's a lot of characters that only show up on certain days, and the days are marked with symbols instead of names, so you just have to remember several different characters and their symbols. I was also stuck for a while because I could not figure out how to unlock smithing. The game's hint was "You'll discover this... somehow". Turned out to be a specific character in the village I had to talk to. What stopped me from playing were gamebreaking bugs. I lost a lot of progress due to a freeze in what you can consider the game's main quest. Apparently that bug always happens if you play the game above 60fps, and completely prevents you from progressing the game past the first couple hours. I also had another bug that may or may not be related to the fps, where the main mechanic of the game also stopped working. I found steam discussions about this from 2024, and it has still not been fixed. So not only dit it make me stop playing this game, but it also makes me not want to get their next game, because clearly they are fine with 100% reproduceable gamebreaking bugs that can cost quite a lot of progress, and require some annoying work arounds to be done by the players. This would be easy to fix, the devs just don't care

this game is amazing.

Tedious. Doesn't respect your time.

At first, the game was kinda fun. But as I kept playing, every tasks felt tedious and unrewarding. It wasn't fun for me and it felt like a chore to play. Interacting with the world would sometimes bug out, stopping me from what I was doing, as I need to be in the right place to keep up with the activity. Like collecting sand. The items spawning on the ground would push me out of the interactable object and stop me from shoveling sand. I was also prone to getting in places. There are some in-game mechanics, or overall information of the game that was glossed over and not explained at all. The tutorial in the game was not enough as I needed to look up online for the ones that I needed to know. A lot of the mechanics also felt undercooked. Overall, this is a mediocre game for me. So I'm gonna have to give it a thumbs down.