Graveyard Keeper

Graveyard Keeper is a simulator of a true medieval cemetery manager. In the game world, heroes await death in coffins and entire tombs of your cemetery. Each new "client" means profit. This can be obtained, for example, by renting family tombs to witches for their sabbath. Or by selling corpses to suspicious individuals. The cemetery manager has its enemies — skeletons, zombies, and other dark forces. Did you 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 facade for the developers — behind it, they have hidden the main vices of capitalism, which the player unobtrusively learns about during the gameplay.

The project does not boast impressive 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 a primitive inventory, basic technologies, and their own hands. The content of the game world is appropriate for the era. After creating a character, the player is introduced to the main location — a small cemetery and a modest house.

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

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

Development in Graveyard Keeper is an important part of the gameplay. You can alleviate 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 similar to all classic crafting games — gather resources, select the necessary blueprint, and conduct research. After that, you can build as many items as needed. Resources can be gathered, found, or purchased, but they also require storage space.

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

There is no overarching plot in Graveyard Keeper, but there are separate stories and side quests. Perhaps a storyline will emerge after the game exits early access.

The game world is filled with various characters, regularly talking to whom allows you to learn new details and events. The characters are well-written, but they are not dull puppets, as the dialogues are thoughtfully constructed and well-translated, making them understandable and providing good laughs.

The gameplay of Graveyard Keeper is designed to show that for the sake of profit, any norms of human morality can be violated. Nothing prevents you from playing the game with the logic of a normal person — honestly burying bodies, making tombstones and fences, as well as earning money from a dozen other activities, like a sawmill and fishing.

But there is a dark side, as the main task of the player is to gain more profit. For example, when a body arrives at the morgue, it can be completely processed! Blood and organs are needed by the witch, meat will come in handy for the innkeeper for human meat sandwiches, fat can be melted down to make church candles, skin can be turned into paper, and so on.

Funerals are also a good business — grave, fence, tombstone, service. Only in this scheme, people need to die every day, so… why not help them?! In Graveyard Keeper, there is a way to slowly poison the locals so that they don't suspect anything. In general, the player will constantly have to solve the ethical dilemma of "profit or honor."