2026-04-14 1102
I’m not sure why, but my initial impression about the game was that it was going to be a puzzle game. I later realized that I had mixed up this game with another game called Slayaway Camp.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/530390/Slayaway_Camp/
I guess it was because of the graveyard aesthetic? I’m not sure. I just remember seeing it on a Giant Bomb Quick Look or something.
Graveyard Keeper however, is not a puzzle game. It’s more of a Stardew Valley clone. A macabre in tone compared to the cozy/whimsical tone that Stardew Valley was going for. Though I’m not a 100% sure. I have yet to play any significant amount of Stardew Valley beyond the initial first couple of minutes. Testing Tailscale]]
2026-04-14 1242
Corpse → Skin → Pigskin → Clean Paper???
You might see me put a ton of these notes down. The game, I don’t think is purposely obfuscating information, but does not do a good job linking what leads to what.
It’s a nice throwback to games where you have to figure out stuff on your own and it fits the game’s story of someone being tossed into an unknown situation and the open world nature of the game does lead to the player having several solutions at once. And that’s because for the most part, the game has let itself be open from the very beginning. Most of the progress of the player is gated behind meeting certain people or unlocking the required skill in the skill tree.
For e.g., one of the first major task of the game is to get you graveyard up to a quality +5. To do so you should pretty up the graves that are currently on your plot. There are numerous ways to get the numbers up, one is to fix the gravestones and fences. Which you think is the main way of doing so. But you’re limited in the number of stone repair kits, I haven’t found a way to buy them yet, but one of the resource required to build one is clay and clay gathering is not unlocked until after this quest.
You could exhume a body, if the quality of the corpse is so bad that it negatively affects the quality of the graveyard but then you only have one exhumation permit on the outset of the game. Getting more is costly and is again locked behind this quest to improve the quality of your graveyard.
So you’re left with fixing up the stone graves with your limited supply of stone repair kits and the rest need to be replaced with wooden graves. What you’re not told is that to get these repair kits, you need to build a carpenter’s workshop. Which needs iron materials, which you need iron ingots, which you need iron ore. You get where I’m coming from? None of these are told to you. So I assumed that I had to buy them. And I didn’t have money, so I thought I had to sell firewood.
2026-04-14 1255
It’s only later that I realize that I could sell my burial certificates. I had initially taken this option off the table because the game explicitly said that the tavern owner, Horadric, would buy them “only if I had any money”, which I took to mean he had no money.
But during one of my runs to sell stuff, I noticed that the burial certificates were salable.
2026-04-14 1310
It’s this… “Man, wouldn’t it have been nice to know the way to actually do this” because I just spent twenty minutes doing it another way because I assumed that was where the dialogue was leading me to believe.
Another case in point, another earlier dialogue, seems to indicate that the way to get iron ore is to fix the bridge and go over there to harvest iron ore from the iron ore deposits. And that’s what I did, that meant I had to buy nails from merchants to fix the bridge. Which wasn’t cheap either.
Guess where could I have harvested iron? Just a few step away from your home to the North. Because the game had actual dialogue about it, I made the assumption that the game would be pointing me towards it which required a lot more work than just… walking North and saving me a lot of money in the process.
It’s a similar feeling I had when I played Elden Ring initially, with the open-world Soulslike, I had assumed that wherever you could go is the path you needed to take. It wouldn’t be much later and with much more experience that I would learn how to tell which areas I had to go first. At which point, I restarted the game to not waste my initial allotment of resources that are given to me for free.
I might do the same thing with Graveyard Keeper. There are so many ways that if you knew what you were doing, you’d save a lot of resources.
2026-04-14 1326
This isn’t to say that it was all wasted effort. The more you perform certain activities, you would gain skill points related to that activity. So even if I’m churning out iron ingots and wooden flints for crafting or for money, I’m still making progress in the game. However, there’s one type of skill point that you can’t farm easily is the study skill point. (I think it’s called study, will double check). It’s required for a lot for the advanced skills and currently to me it seems like it’s only unlocked after fixing up the graveyard and gaining access to the church. BUT, I think you have to talk about the Astrologer with a couple of the townsfolk before you’re able to talk to him proper, or it’s just that unlocking the church unlocked the story progress with the Astrologer.
Anyways, the Bishop gave me a couple of items that I could have studied to gain the blue study points, but because I didn’t check the inventory, I didn’t know that I had to read them and assumed that I would be given the skill points automatically. So I had to unlock the Astrologer, buy his two pieces of clean paper every week on the one day he appears, study them to get science points and then study the body parts I harvested to get blue study skill points. That or just look into my inventory and get a couple of free skill points.
It’s interesting that the game gives you a couple of ways to tackle a situation but it would have been nice to not waste time figuring out other ways to reach the same end goal when there was another one sitting right there if they would have just “tutorialed” me into. I guess I’m also a little spoiled by how modern games just stop the game to tutorialize you. Which I will have to add right here, the speed at which the text box moves, you might as well have added a tutorial and increased the textbox speed by 50%.
2026-04-14 1339
As much as I feel that the QoL of the game can be improved. The gameplay loop currently is very satisfying… once I figured something out, I’m basically adding it to the list of spinning plates I have to do as the days pass and I have to manage my stamina. I’m not sure if there are ways to automate anything yet.
I’m at the point now where the donkey is no longer bringing in corpses anymore and I have yet to figure out what the item I need to grease his wheels is. I can’t hover over the icon to check out what it’s called. Another one of those, if I finally figure it out I’d be kicking myself because why didn’t I look into this tree or that crafting station enough to figure these things out.
NPCs
Astrologer
Bishop
Donkey
- Delivers corpses for free at the start. Requires payment of 5 carrots per corpse once you have access to the church.
Gerry
Horadric
- Says money is tight, but that is not an indication that you can’t trade with him.
- Buys “Burial certificates” for 1 silver and 50 bronze coins each