Brush off your shovels, farmers, and prepare for the perfect cozy game to start your fall off with. But your shovel won’t just be good for digging up those pesky weeds around your farmland, it’s also pretty handy for all of those bodies as well.
Yup, Graveyard Keeper is a quirky little twist on the Stardew Valley farming simulator formula. Lazy Bear Games published the game back in 2018 and has released some pretty neat DLCs to spice up the old story. But the classic version works a little bit like this:
Truck-Sama Gets Us Again – Story Thus Far
The story of the Graveyard Keeper is a simple one; you are reminiscing upon seeing your dear loved one after a long day but because you were not paying attention succumbed to the fate most main characters do. You got run over by a vehicle. Fear not, because an incredibly daunting-looking figure greets us in a foggy-like place that is neither here nor there and says that our story is not over yet. Cue us being isekai-ed to an era not quite unlike the Salem Witch trials timeline. We are advised to help out a skull by digging them out of our yard and informed that we are the new Graveyard Keeper. Not given much of a choice but to learn about this new world, we start our wacky adventures trying to find a way to get back home and keep from getting hung, burned or impaled by a wooden stake in this strange and paranoid little town as we work our job as the Graveyard Keeper.
Waste Not, Want Not – Gameplay
The game pretty much leaves you to figure out how to organize your days while loosely giving you guidelines about where to go and who to affiliate with to get certain quests done. But your primary job is to take care of your graveyard. Not only are you granted access to the church grounds to pick up taking care of the gravesites that are already there, but you are also in charge of any deceased that come to the church. But according to Gerry, our talking skull, that isn’t our only job. Apparently, we can get money by selling off meat to the locals and that’s how an eerie story begins to unfold about the past keepers that have come and gone through this strange portal, researching the science of anatomy and selling bits and pieces of them to be consumed.
Aside from cremation and butchering up the locals for a profit, the Graveyard Keeper also gets to do all the normal stuff farming simulators are famous for too. Like actual farming, they get a field and a large yard to perform their own lumber and ironwork so that they can not only upgrade their kitchen but upgrade tools and once the church is unlocked begin expanding their practices through the tunnels underground. There are plenty of different trees of experience to explore such as Gardening skills, Butchering skills, Alchemy and Smithing.
There are also relations you can pick up in town! Such as the leader of the town, the Barkeep who helps get us started in how to familiarize ourselves with the town and get started as the Keeper. There are also shops to help such as Lumber and Smithing as well as a Farmer who can get us started with seeds for our own garden.
There are a lot of different aspects to the game that is an ADHD nightmare since as soon as you start one task, you’ll probably end up with three more. But that’s what makes the game so fun and incredibly addictive. It’s got an ensnaring quality with the gameplay that only grows deeper with the town’s dark secrets and the appearance of the Inquisitor who will burn witches and heretics. The last place we want to be is on this town’s bad side and there’s no worse place to be than being the new guy.
Jordan is a student studying Digital and Print Journalism at the University of North Texas. After discovering how much fun gaming journalism can be, she hopes to make a career in it once she graduates. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys playing games such as Genshin Impact, Ace Attorney, and Fire Emblem or watching Murder, She Wrote late at night on weekdays.
