#graveyard keeper

fucking stop. let games stand on their own. not every farming life sim is going play like stardew just because they're a farming life sim. it's not a "stardew clone" just because it's using pixel art. it's not even like stardew was the first. on top of that, there's only so much you can do when you're in the same damn gerne.

Could you elaborate a tiny bit on why it was a disappointment ? It looked good... Also RIP 100 hours invested in a bad experience, I'm so sorry for you :(

Believe it or not this isn't my rant but there are so many problems that piss me off it's hard to summarize lol. Basically the game is fairly hollow and short, but bad game design artificially pads the gameplay. A lack of objectives/structure and unintuitive systems are excused as "exploration", "playing at your own pace", and "doesn't hold the player's hand". Many of the in-game mechanics are woefully unbalanced or otherwise make no logical sense: for instance, the Simple, Good, and Excellent fishing rods are not actually tiers of the same item but entirely separate tools with exclusive functions; e.g. you cannot catch Good rod fish with the Excellent rod and there is nowhere in game or within common sense that would imply this.

The worst offender is that there is actually no point in farming anything beyond what you need for the story as you cannot sell the majority of what you produce—namely beer and wine (unless you buy DLC!!!1)—because of in-game inflation mechanics. It also goes both ways: the more you buy from a vendor, the more he charges; the more you sell to a vendor, the less he will pay you for it. Even the business you start in game is limited to certain goods and quantities; you can only ship 10 crates a week.

Many players, myself included, spent the majority of their time wrestling with inventory. Item stacks and production yields are completely disproportionate to their necessity and there is not much you can do with the excess. Like one of the only unique aspects of this game compared to other farming sims is that you doctor and raise zombies to automate labor but there's really no point in doing so because it just produces more shit that you can't do anything with.

Keeping the graveyard—the name of the damn game—is pointless after an early quest. It's not even fun to decorate just for the aesthetic because crafting is tedious and the upgrades are basically just reskins of the same 2 fences/headstones with minimal customization. EVERYTHING in the game has a predetermined grid for where to build. Literally like placing a 3x4 square on a 4x4 grid. And SOMETIMES you can rotate. Wow, spoil me why don't you.

I got the game during the free weekend so I'm glad I didn't spend actual money on it but I sure wasted a bunch of time wishing it was better. The autopsy/embalming mechanic for zombies is cool but like I said there's little reason to optimize zombies or bodies for the graveyard when there's no benefit or consequence. At its core it's a cynical attempt to ride the coattails of Stardew's success without understanding why it was successful or what people enjoy in farm sims. And the devs are not subtle about it either, as at the end of the campaign the NPCs joke that their unsatisfactory game will be remedied in DLC so they can make more money.

Also the only women in the game are male NPC adjuncts, a literal witch, and a lusty jezebel (complete w G slur no less). Like, hilariously archaic misogynist stereotypes.

Graveyard keeper is free to keep on steam right now! Just redeem it to your steam account before the 13th of April 2026! It's a fun game really recommended it if it looks interesting to you!