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.
