Graveyard Keeper

Graveyard Keeper is a medieval-themed management simulation game in which you take on the role of a graveyard keeper. You are tasked with managing your own cemetery—clearing away obstacles and weeds, exploring various areas to gather materials, and crafting new items to expand your burial grounds. You can generate income to further develop your cemetery by selling corpses to the local butcher or by venturing into dungeons of varying difficulty. As the game progresses, you will encounter a diverse cast of NPCs; by interacting with them and completing their quests, you can unlock new materials and technologies.

Gameplay of Graveyard Keeper:

The player takes the role of a person hit by a car and sent to an unfamiliar world with medieval fantasy setting where he is tasked with taking care of the local cemetery and church. Determined to return home and reunite with his lover, the graveyard keeper interacts with the locals while helping with their problems. Eventually, the keeper learns of a portal that is said to make any wish come true, but needs some special magic items to make it work, which are in possession of some of the village's most influential characters. After earning their trust and obtaining the items, the keeper bids farewell to his friends and wishes to reunite with his lover, but instead of returning him home, the portal brings his lover to his side instead. Extra DLC content reveals that the keeper can't return home because he (just like his predecessors) has the sacred task of acting as an intermediary between the village's inhabitants and the afterlife and it was revealed that the Ancient God brought him here and split him in two: his aggressive side is sent to the Town while his compassionate side had his memory wiped of what happened to him recently and was assigned to become the new graveyard keeper for the village.

Graveyard Keeper is a graveyard-keeping management simulation game inspired by Stardew Valley and based on Harvest Moon. At the start of the game, the player becomes the recipient of a plot of land including a small graveyard once owned by his predecessor near a small town. The cemetery plot is initially overrun with boulders, trees, stumps, and weeds, and the player must work to clear them in order to restart its operation, tending to graves and even the church so as to generate revenue and bring donations to church coffers. Your ultimate goal is to get your character to open a portal back to his old world. To that end, you need information and help from various NPCs, whom you will be trying to please them, or do their quests. Such quests usually involves gameplay elements like bringing them some crafted or collectable items like oil, honey etc. More gameplay elements and areas slowly unlock throughout the game as you unlock new technologies. The skill tree in this game is called a Technology Tree, and you unlock new technologies to progress in the game. Beyond the early game, Graveyard Keeper requires you to have three different types of experience points: Red, Blue, and Green to unlock most of the technologies. Other than tending to graves and clearing out environmental elements, the game also has farming, smithing, rudimentary combat, multi-level dungeon, fishing, and an extensive crafting system.

Features of Graveyard Keeper:

A Deep Simulation Game: This is not just a game of fun. Throughout the gameplay, you are going to face some real-life scenarios. The feelings of happiness, blue, greed, courage, guilt, and more are going to be faced by you. The best part is the ethical dilemmas. Are you sure you are going to close, or do you have an unlimited supply of meat that you can put to use to grow your business? It is up to you.

Built New Things from Scratch: This game offers you the opportunity to be resourceful. There is plenty of material around you in the premises that can be utilized for a purpose. Now, you can expand your graveyard into a thriving business. Explore the land, and it has many things to offer you. All it needs is your creativity and a talent for building things.

Go on Quests and Deal with Corpses: You know what? These dead bodies are going to rot in the dirt anyway. Why don’t you put them to use and help the real people in need? If you are confused about how it is possible, there are thousands of deaths each year due to organ failures and a lack of donors. Why don’t you start providing them? Well, you have the raw material, you know what I mean! Apart from this, you can become part of various quests and become a role-player in this game.

Become the Ultimate Explorer: There comes a time when you will get bored taking care of the dead. This is the point where real fun begins. In this pixelated art world, you can go on quests and explore the mysterious dungeons. You can now take a trip into the unknown and discover those essential alchemy ingredients. To become a tycoon, you will have to wade into the forbidden territories anyway.

Strategies of Graveyard Keeper:

When you start the game you will go through tutorial of shorts when you take a body to be buried. Pay attention to the skulls on the body's description when you are in the autopsy menu. This mechanic is not explained to you until you complete a quest for a ghost.

Basically each corpse has a rating system based upon how they were in life. This is separate from the percentile that you see above the body. The regular skulls and the red skulls represent the good deeds and sins a person had done in their life. The more good skulls the better rating your graveyard will have.

If you have a body that is too degraded or has too many red skulls it is NOT worth burying in your graveyard. You're better off with cremation.

To help slow the decay of the body make sure you repair the body shoot, on the outside and inside of your morgue. For the longest time I had no idea I had to repair the inside as well haha. Once these are prepared when a body is delivered then it will auto go to the morgue.

To further help with decay make the slabs to put bodies on. (You will have to manually put the bodies on these slabs, they will just show up on the floor when going through the body shoot).

During Autopsy it is possible to earn some white skulls and get rid of some red skulls if you remove certain things from the body.

Now back to the graveyard ratings, you can see your ratings while in the graveyard. Everything that contributes to the rating will be highlighted with the current number of their rating. Graves that have negative ratings are in need of your attention first. You can make various objects to help improve their rating. But again pay attention to the skulls!

If the body has too many red skulls, they will consume all of the points that you put in with your head stones and grave boarders. If a body is beyond beautifying it is better to exhume it and burn it.

You can exhume a body by getting the proper certificate through the mailbox next to the church. It costs 1 silver and 75 copper.

Player Comments of Graveyard Keeper:

No detail has been missed when it comes to the ambient sound and this attention to detail makes for an overall immersive and rich audio experience. The beautiful pixelated visuals are likely to stand the test of time and with so much to do in the game it’s likely that players will keep coming back for more. The map contains new areas to unlock and this should keep players striving to reach these inaccessible places when not sinking hours into beautifying both church and graveyard. After playing the game for many hours I feel like I have still only scratched the surface. I am a big fan of the genre and this game did not fail to fulfill my expectations.

I have a 5th generation iPad mini, and I hesitated to buy this game because of all the reviews…but I did it because my friends said this game was a blast on Steam, but I prefer to game on my iPad.Now with over 600 in-game days, I can confirm this game will not crash nor lose your progress.  I’m careful to always “sleep” my avatar before closing…the game appears to save when he says “I feel so refreshed!” on waking up. Controls get a little buggier as you progress, but nothing unbearable. Finally, I was trapped in a looping cutscene waiting for the vampire hunter, but I just closed the app and got the quest again after I reopened it, so no biggie. I hope this helps you decide whether to buy this game! 

I wasn’t sure whether or not to review the game or the port of the game. Since it a cross-platform game with lots of reviews of the game itself online already, I’m going to stick to the port of this game for my review. I also have not played with the expansion.It’s mostly a nice port. I waited to play it after the first patch or two, so I haven’t seen the nightly crash happen in the game. The graphics are nice, the game runs smoothly, and the music doesn’t jitter like a lot of games do on the new iPad Pro. Overall, with the exception of what I’m about to talk about, I think they did a good job.The biggest issue for me is, not shockingly, the controls. I have the large iPad, so holding it like a controller can be unwieldy. To solve this problem with this and other games I bought an actual controller - the steelseries specifically. It works great with the game....except for crafting. The controller is amazing and very responsive, but the second I try to craft at any table/fire/thing it has a 90% chance of crashing. If somehow I do get the crafting screen to open, there’s a 100% chance it will crash when I switch tabs or a 100% chance to crash when I go to craft. This forces me to use the controller for everything then use finger controls to craft. It’s playable, but I’ve forgotten every so often and I lose my days work when I use the controller to craft.If they could fix it so my controller always worked, I would be so happy and up the rating. It’s just slowing my gameplay by switching back and forth.I’m using an iPad pro(3rd Gen) 12.9” with iOS 12.3.1 and with a steel series nimbus controller. Besides the constant crashing when using the controller. I haven’t seen any other bugs. 

Final words:

From here, the impression that Graveyard Keeper leaves is enormous. The attraction was pushed to the climax and won a lot of favor from the fastidious guests. The novel game combined with the ghostly gameplay is also a unique feature and causes strong feelings. Try to experience these great things and feel the heat that the game brings.