Nerdful Things – ‘Graveyard Keeper’ (PS4) Review
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First Impressions
I’d seen the game listed on the Playstation Store for some time but I just skipped past it. I have no idea why as this game is right up my alley. I love a good business sim – Sim City, Transport Tycoon, Tropico and, most recently, Farm Together. For the past few months, Farm Together has eaten up a significant amount of my life but Graveyard Keeper has ousted it from its spot. Don’t get me wrong, I will still be playing Farm Together, just not so much.
The game doesn’t really hold your hand – there’s a bit of a tutorial but after that, you’re pretty much on your own. This is both disappointing and brilliant. Once you get used to and embrace this fact, the game will either take over your life or it will break you (or both?). It’s very satisfying to discover something all on your own and to then apply that newfound logic to other aspects of the game. Resource management is tricky – I’m a hoarder by nature so storage space is always an issue for me but it adds to the challenge and enjoyment of the game – do I discard this item so I can take that other one back home? Argh! It’s a quandary. Especially when, unlike other games of its ilk, you can’t craft or buy a new backpack to upgrade your carry space.
Graphically, it is beautiful and quirky as you would expect from its title and premise. The game had six days – six of the seven deadly sins:
Pride | |
Lust | |
Gluttony | |
Envy | |
Wrath | |
Sloth |
Some characters or activities are only available on their respective day i.e. once you have opened the church, you can hold a sermon every Pride to earn coins and Faith (needed for studies and creating zombies, if you have the Breaking Dead DLC). The icon for Gluttony is more like Quake so I’be taken to referring to it as Quake Day. Due to certain characters’ availability, it can be challenging and frustrating especially with inventory management when you need to take items to them and you’ve either stored them and forgotten to collect them or you misjudged how many you needed and you have to wait a whole week before trying again. Days last for seven and a half minutes (real time).
The game is full of dark humour and interesting characters. The sheer charm of this game is more than enough to take my mind off of the typo-riddled dialogue. My favourite sound effect within the game is the talking donkey (he delivers corpses to you almost every day).
Gameplay
As I mentioned above, you get a bit of a tutorial at the start – introducing you to your new job and the process of preparing corpses for the ground and exhumation. There is a plethora of quests, most of which have various stages before true completion. Even from the start some of the quests can’t be completed until much later in the game which threw me a bit as most other games have nice, short quests which pave the way for longer form quests – it took me a little while to realise this as I started off assuming I was going to be raking in the rewards from the onset.
Repetition is key and there’s no escaping it. That being said, it doesn’t get boring. You’re always striving for the next milestone such as enough items to craft the next level tech such as upgrading your furnace to furnace II and so on. I’ve spent around forty hours on the game so far and I am still finding new things and learning more efficient and better ways of doing things.
There are red, green and blue points you have to acquire in order to unlock new items on the Technology Tree to learn new abilities, unlock new blueprints and enhance your overall abilities. The blue ones are the hardest to get as you have to study other items that reward blue points or read books which you can buy from The Astrologer.
Managing your morgue and church yard becomes a struggle as the requirements to increase space in your cemetery become harder and I’ve spent in-game weeks not taking in new corpses as I cannot shift the ones I’ve already got stored as I have no plots to bury any more bodies. Once I unlocked my zombie woodcutter (only in the Breaking Dead DLC), I was able to create lots of cremation spots to clear out the bodies and keep earning burial certificates which you need to earn money from the owner of the village pub.
There are so many activities to partake in – later in the game you unlock a farm on your yard so you can grow crops to provide you with ingredients for cooking or to sell to the local farmer, you can go fishing (more on that below), you can unlock other areas by building bridges or clearing paths and there’s also a dungeon beneath your house/church that you can delve into and kill monsters and acquire items for quests and alchemy and so on.
Fishing. The game doesn’t explain fishing. It took me ages to work it out – it doesn’t help that I play my PlayStation through Remote Play on my laptop during the day so the minor delay meant I caught barely anything – you have to time it perfectly with the sound/little ripple animation in the water to then get to the next part of reeling it in. Basically, you have to keep the fish in the bar until the metre fills up – tapping X raises the bar and the metre fills up as long as the fish stays within it. When I played it in bed on my actual console last night, I had a perfect streak but it does take a bit of getting used to. For me, that’s probably the trickiest mechanic in the game to master and is likely to be one of the hardest tasks for trophy completion as there are a few fishing related ones in the list.
At the time of writing this, I am 154.4 game days in with a church rating of 15 and a graveyard rating of 33. I still have a long way to go and have a lot of technologies to unlock. My church is about to be upgraded but I need to earn enough coin for a permit to do so. I played it from about 17:30 yesterday until about 03:00 this morning (I did have some breaks in between but was on it solid from about 22:30 til 03:00) – I turned it off as I couldn’t sell any items to the landlord of the pub, the blacksmith, the miller or the farmer as they didn’t have enough coin to even cover the cost of one item. I panicked as Googling this issue turned up a possible glitch where if you have left items lying loose on the map, they will cause this. I had chopped a tree down, miles from home and couldn’t take all the parts home (I had carried one and kicked the second piece all the way back – this is fiddly as hell) and I can’t remember where exactly the remaining pieces will be. Thankfully, after loading back into the game, the merchants have had their coffers replenished and I can go back to saving for my first gold piece ready for my church upgrade.
I have, however, stumbled into another glitch that I can’t seem to resolve – the blacksmith, Krezvold, will only give me a maximum of six bronze pieces for ANYTHING I sell. If I sell him an item, all other items will garner me absolutely no money regardless of quantity. I noticed it around the same time as the above glitch but I don’t know when it may have actually arisen as I’ve only sold to him once before (flogged a few bits of firewood). It wouldn’t be so bad but I need to unlock the cauldron and he’s the only place I can obtain it and it’s in his tier II items.
In the log, the NPC tracker keeps a hold of your relationship status with each NPC and details of any quests you need to complete for them. It’s nice, concise and is incredibly helpful, especially after such a long time working on a quest and you forget where you are with the others.
The map is merely a reference – there’s no indicator for where you currently are or any other markers such as active quests etc. Again, the game kind of lets you figure this out in terms of noted landmarks and your knowledge of the area. This isn’t as daunting as it sounds as navigation isn’t complicated and it’s hard to actually get lost. Once you unlock the undercroft and the other areas, navigation becomes easier as it unlocks shortcuts to the village and another area which I am yet to unlock (I believe it may be the fort?).
Verdict
Overall, I am highly impressed with the game. It is so easy to get engrossed in it and, thanks to the super short in-game days, time in the real world seems to just disappear also! There is so much to do and the only annoyance is how quickly energy can be expended but that’s where the food and potions come in. Tell a lie, the other annoyance is not being able to upgrade the storage space for items you can carry.
I’ve only ran into the glitches noted above (I may update with any new ones I encounter and/or a fix for my blacksmith glitch) and, to be fair, how often do we play a game where there aren’t glitches? Yes, this could be a game breaker for me but I’ve posted it over on the subreddit and the devs seem to pay attention to the posts there so perhaps there will be a patch in the future unless it resolves itself. I’m going to try and buy some stuff from him at some point to see if this un-breaks him (not doing it yet as I want to save up for a gold coin so I’m keeping my spending to a minimum).
EDIT: I have now managed to trade with the blacksmith successfully – not sure if it was due to me purchasing some items or me inadvertently finding the loose items that I picked up and took home. Or a combination of the two. Either way, he’s fixed. Yay!
The Breaking Dead DLC is simply a must. Trying to manage resources on your own is hard work – manageable to begin with but as your material needs increase you really need help in acquiring wood, stone and ore for your newer and bigger projects. Not only that, it’s quite fun selecting the best corpse and carting him off to wherever you want him working.
Devastatingly, from what I understand, the end of the game is literally that so hopefully there’ll be some further DLC or a new game+ to give this more longevity and replayability.
If you like games like Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, Farm Together or even if you fancy something new or a change of pace, I highly recommend checking this out.
Remember and get discounted wallet top ups and PS+/XBox Live Gold subscriptions for your PlayStation/XBox, FIFA Coins and so much more over at Electronic First
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