Since I spent most of my game time last week over the Spooktober weekend, I decided to scratch through the Halloween Collection that PS Plus had set up. There were about 20 games on the list, which helped narrow things down a little for this week’s pick. If you know me even a little, you’ll know that I scrolled through all of them and picked the one that had the scariest-looking cover art and then I crossed that one straight off the list! Scary games? Me? Never. I can barely survive the clickers in TLOU, never mind something actually scary.
So, what did we land up on in the end? Well, something that I quite enjoyed.
Graveyard Keeper.
Graveyard Keeper is published by TinyBuild games, which has most notably done the “Hello” series of games, like Hello Neighbour, but more up my alley was Undungeon. So, when I saw the TinyBuild logo pop up, I had a feeling I was going to enjoy this one.
The beginning of the game is a little lacklustre, but really sets the tone for how the rest of the game is going to play out. You’re greeted with a comic-style story piece that lasts all of two seconds and then you’re suddenly brought back to life, in some other world where you’re now the keeper of the graveyard. Another pretty short tutorial and wham, bam thank you ma’am, you’re in the thick of it. There’s no real instruction on what to do or how to do it, you kind of just have to figure it all out for yourself, all you know is, this place is weird and you want to get back to the not-so-weird place you came from.
At it’s core Graveyard Keeper is a sim game, you dig up graves, you bury people, you get better at it, you make better gravestones, and you get rewarded for it. It’s an addictive little game loop where you slowly craft your way to better and better things, eventually impressing your way back home. When playing it though, you start seeing the dark, twisted humour that gives Graveyard Keeper its edge. There’s an alcoholic skull, a self-absorbed priest, a power-hungry inquisitor, an overworked blacksmith, a hemp-growing “hippy”-styled hobo, and of course a lot more, but playing between them all adds that little bit of spice to keep you going back to the towns instead of just keeping to yourself and farming all the trees until you become expert level carpenter on day one.
There’s a bit of a “quest” system that also forces you to interact with a few of the main characters in order to progress further on in the tech tree, which I feel is the way to get back home… I have yet to find my way back home after 30 hours of game time… but you will often find yourself zoning out, chopping down trees to fill your log storage, or mining in the swamps to make sure you have enough ore to keep your iron nail production chain flowing. The game rewards this monotonous auto-botting of your brain by giving you experience points in one of three fields (INSERT FIELDS HERE) that also help you move on up in the tech tree, so it’s not like it’s a bad thing, just zero-ing out your mind, snacking on some couch snacks, in full couch position killing green jelly’s until you have enough slime to make the perfect pudding.
All in all, even though I was still unable to make my way back home, I found so much comfort in the dark humour, sim-style, and gameplay of Graveyard Keeper. Harvesting the fat of a dead body to craft candles for my church in order to get the townsfolk to donate money, so that I could get a better autopsy table in order to harvest more fat, was a satisfying loop that could keep almost anyone busy for days. I’m pretty sure I was quite close to getting back to the not-so-weird world of my in-game wife and child, but I could also see myself spending many, many more hours working my way up the tech tree that probably had no relevance to actually making my way back home. (Story completion is around 45 hours, 100% is closer to 60).
Graveyard Keeper is an enjoyable, dark-humoured sim that will appeal to most sim players, and if you’re looking for something to tide you over to the next pay-day because you spent all your money on a backup power supply for all the Load Shedding, I’d definitely recommend giving Graveyard Keeper a dig.