
This game urges you to search for secrets and uncover new areas. But Graveyard Keeper puts those quests at the top, and straight away, your goal is clear: It’s not to become the best at running a cemetery or farm but to get home. Even though I love running a farm, once I get married and finish all the quests, I often fall off those types of games. Lazy Bear Games fixes one of the end-of-life issues that I have with games like Stardew Valley. Between this and exploring the map, I didn’t actually end up doing much farming even though I had a plot of land conveniently located next to the graveyard. And afterward, you must fix it up with a nice headstone and maintain the graveyard so that it’s not in disarray. You must process it, dig a new grave in the cemetery, and bury it. A few times each week, a talking donkey appears with a new corpse for you to deal with. Though it has a familiar user interface and mechanics, it’s solidly centered on your responsibility to the cemetery. This gruesome aspect sets Graveyard Keeper apart from other simulation games. The FDA doesn’t exist in Graveyard Keeper, so you can get a black-market stamp to mark the meat as fit for human consumption and sell it for money. For instance, whenever you prepare a body for burial in your cemetery, you can harvest parts from it - meat, skin, and bones. Plus, it’s hard to imagine the sparks flying between the hapless protagonist and oppressed peasants. It doesn’t seem like romance is a very big part of this game - back in the “real world,” your character already has a girlfriend. Whenever I ran out of stamina, I explored the map and got to know the townspeople. Every time I chopped down a tree or shattered a rock, I got skill points to spend on learning new technology. The first order of business was to gather enough resources - wood, stone, small sticks - so I could build workstations and advance up the tech tree. Like Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon, you have a stamina bar and a day/night cycle to contend with, so I began setting weekly goals for myself.
GRAVEYARD KEEPER BLUE POINTS SIMULATOR
That’s now the role that you must fill.Īs I played the alpha demo on PC, I immediately fell into the familiar rhythms of this type of simulator game. It’s implied that every so often, a stranger appears out of nowhere and assumes responsibility for the upkeep of the local cemetery. And, for some reason, everyone calls you the Graveyard Keeper. Your trusted companion is a talking skull with a drinking problem. It’s a world where inquisitors burn witches and astrologers know about inter-dimensional portals.

However, people who buy the game in advance can play an alpha demo.Īfter getting hit by a car, you wake up in a strange, pseudo-medieval village that seems to exist on another plane of reality or, at the very least, outside of time.
GRAVEYARD KEEPER BLUE POINTS PC
It’s Lazy Bear Games’ second title, and it teamed up with publisher Tiny Build to launch it later this year on PC and Xbox One on August 15. It’s a farming-slash-mortuary simulator where players must run a cemetery while planting cabbages, fighting slime monsters, fishing, and figuring out how they ended up in the situation in the first place.

Graveyard Keeper is like Stardew Valley … but with 100 percent more skeletons. Interested in learning what's next for the gaming industry? Join gaming executives to discuss emerging parts of the industry this October at GamesBeat Summit Next.
