Graveyard Keeper

Graveyard Keeper — a simulator of a true manager of a medieval cemetery. In the game world, heroes are awaited by death in coffins and entire mausoleums of your cemetery. Each new "client" means profit. It can also be obtained, for example, by renting family tombs to witches for their sabbath. Or by selling corpses to suspicious individuals. The cemetery manager has his own enemies — skeletons, zombies, and other dark forces. Did you really think that life among the dead would be carefree? Especially in the Middle Ages?

Graveyard Keeper is a cemetery management simulator with RPG and crafting elements from the indie studio Lazy Bear Games. Providing ritual services is just a front for the developers — behind it, they have hidden the main vices of capitalism, which the player subtly gets acquainted with during the playthrough.

The project does not shine with graphics, offering a classic "drawn" visual style of isometric games with well-developed locations, a top-down camera, and the simplest animation.

The action of Graveyard Keeper takes place in the Middle Ages, with the player having at their disposal a primitive inventory, the simplest technologies, and their own hands. The contents of the game world match the era. After creating a character, the player is introduced to the main location — a small cemetery and a modest house.

In Graveyard Keeper, there is a fairly large, well-developed game world that needs to be explored. Around the cemetery, there are forests, rivers, a witch's swamp, a church, a farm, a large village, a lighthouse, and a port. Each point has its own activities — you can communicate, trade, gather resources, take quests, and organize events.

There is also a multi-level dungeon where you need to kill monsters and can find particularly rare ingredients. You will definitely have to develop your base by building new machines and mastering new services.

Development in Graveyard Keeper is an important part of the gameplay. You can ease the character's suffering by upgrading technologies, improving almost all aspects of the game world — the house, church, workshop, crematorium, the cemetery itself, as well as additional sources of income — farms.

The mechanics are like all classic crafting games — gather resources, choose the necessary blueprint, and conduct research. After that, you can build as many items as needed. Resources can be gathered, found, or bought, but they also require storage space.

The player is given complete freedom of action — you can engage in developing the cemetery, explore the world to complete quests, or take up farming and beekeeping.

There is no global plot in Graveyard Keeper; instead, there are separate stories and secondary quests. Perhaps the plot will appear after the game exits early access.

The game world is filled with various characters, and by regularly talking with them, you can learn all new details and events. The characters are simply written, but they are not dumb dummies that are boring to interact with, as the dialogues are composed thoughtfully and translated competently, making them understandable and allowing for a good laugh.

The gameplay of Graveyard Keeper is designed to show that for the sake of profit, any norms of human morality can be violated. Ничто не мешает пройти игру в логике нормального человека — честно хоронить тела, изготавливать памятники и оградки, а также зарабатывать на десятке других дел, вроде лесопилки и рыбалки.

Но есть и темная сторона, ведь главная задача игрока — получать больше прибыли. Например, когда тело поступает в морг, его можно полностью переработать! Кровь и органы нужны ведьме, мясо пригодится трактирщику на бутерброды с человечиной, жир можно растопить и наделать церковных свечей, кожу превратить в бумагу и так далее.

Похороны тоже хороший бизнес — могила, оградка, памятник, служба. Только в этой схеме люди должны умирать каждый день, так… почему бы им не помочь?! В Graveyard Keeper есть способ потихоньку травить местных так, что те не догадаются. В общем, игроку придется постоянно решать этическую дилемму «прибыль или честь».