I think it’s leaking memory, I find if I quit and restart it goes away until I walk through the wheat field about 6-10 times.
I’m a little over 10 hours in.
Would not recommend it in the current state.
It was a good mindless thing while resting an injury, but not very fun after awhile. Trying to figure out alchemy without reading spoiler sites was my “Why am I still playing this?” uninstall moment.
I’ve played a bit more. I keep coming back to how I’m not really pulled forward by anything. I have tasks to accomplish, yes, but the lack of enforced sleeping at night removes the diurnal rhythm from the game and turns my energy bar into a boring necessity to work around rather than a resource to utilize effectively.
I’ll probably come back to it, but as much as I like some aspects of it (tone, progression, presentation) it doesn’t quite all come together.
I hate to say it, but it feels like GK could have used an Early Access period.
It had one, but only for Kickstarter backers apparently.
Either the devs didn’t prioritize things correctly, or they were very focused on finishing content, or both. But the post release patches certainly indicate a game where the balance wasn’t done (and maybe isn’t close to done). Reductions in work times, tweaked tool efficiencies, rendering certain resources permanent (as of yesterday), adding fast travel, changing resource requirements, longer days. . . It’s a surprisingly a mount of stuff and a pretty radical set of changes just after release.
Also the progression in this is not good. Stuff is gated behind mysterious conversations, or not clearly marked as being behind certain technologies. Frequently you get left with no clear idea of how to progress certain things. The progression has a ton of potential, but it’s messy.
Fair enough on progression. I was thinking mostly of the explicit xp pips for doing things and the tech tree, that felt all right to me.
The risk/reward thing on autopsies is wack, though. Sheesh.
They sold an alpha Early Access thing about 2 months ago. I bought it, thinking it would be in development a while and they ended the EA period after like 2 weeks and then announced the game would be out a month later. I knew it was in trouble at that point.
I like explicit xp for doing things. I like the tech tree in principle. But (1) it, or actions you need to leverage techs will be gated behind weird story things and (2) you wind up hard stuck where you get techs, think you are progressing towards something, only to find you can’d do one or more ingredients along the way. Further, there’s a really optimal order to do things that’s not obvious up front and not in a good way (in other words: it’s not simply a matter of getting better and the mechanics and maybe a little foreknowledge that holds you back; it’s a lot of foreknowledge).
I need ink. I have no idea where to get one ingredient. I decided to spoil myself. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken me to determine how to make it; I see no path from where I am trhat gets me to making what I need for black ink. But, like a lot of things, you can buy ink. However it’s expensive (and my money making is very limited right now because of another thing I can’t do), and worse I forgot to progress the Astrologer Quest for awhile and now I have to wait another 6 days before he shows up to sell it again. I’m not even sure how much ink I’ll be able to buy.
I think I would’ve enjoyed it more with those patches. Hopefully they keep making QOL improvements. Will give it another look after they show up on xbox
My biggest problem with the game was there was no… fluff, heart, soul? Everything almost felt like a grind to grind a different thing. Nothing else to do. It was like one of those mobile games with double progress/speed IAP & a cash shop.
Astrologer is the best vendor. I was going to him every week, check out what else he sells.
Wait… this is from the same developer that made Punch Club? Hard pass. I still cannot believe that so many people were positive about that game.
Yeah I am about 3 hours into Punch club and the F-U-N is just about gone, being replaced by repetition and what feels like wasted time to get anything done.
I am sad Graveyard Keeper turned out to be a dud at launch, seems like it still needs a ton of balance.
I wouldn’t say dud but it needs work. There’s things about it that are better than Stardew, or might appeal more to a certain set. There’s no timer just driving you forward and haunting everything you do, making for a more leisurely experience where each awakening can be entirely dedicated to whatever you want. This is not an approach I am saying is better, mind you. Just different, and it has it’s own pros and cons.
It does offer a pretty wide range of activities which is very cool. And they’re not all the same. E.g. Beekeeping has it’s own stuff going on that makes it different from just another way to gather grown crops.
Things the game needs right now IMO:
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perhaps some pointers to help smooth over the rough edges in progression.
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I would ease some of the energy costs further, frankly.
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This might be in there still waiting for me, but I would like a way to ease some of the tedious chores. I’m locked into a cycle of chop trees to get 9 logs, make 27 circular wood thingies, make 3 burial pyres. I have to do this every 7-10 days at the most, because I need to swap out shitty corpses from my graveyard so I can improve the beauty score. Also please someone just give me a permanent way to cremate already. FFS.
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Some stuff isn’t well explained. E.g. how corpse “quality” impacts your beauty score, or how some actions you do during autopsy impact this. There are a few others I can’t recall.
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If you craft a large batch of stuff, there’s no way to cancel it. This means you have to wait until everything is done and this can take literal days/weeks in game. E.g. glass: glass gives you 1 blue xp per craft. So if you craft a bunch your furance is tied up until it’s all done. I hope you don’t run out of iron ingots and then need them, because you won’t be getting any (you can buy them from the blacksmith in the village but they re super expensive). I made a second furnace at one point because of this. I had one furnace make glass for like two straight weeks. But some streamer had a button “stick” and accidentlaly crafted some absurd amount of I don’t even know what in the furnace similar station and he was stuck until it finished.
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For reasons surpassing human understanding, some of the “passive” crafting stations can have multiple items queued up (e.g. Furnace, oven) but not others (e.g. Compost Pile).
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for reasons surpassing human understanding, the writing/divine/alchemy crafting area cannot have any trunks placed there which means you cannot craft from straight out of trunk inventory, unlike almost every other crafting area in the entire game (this is otherwise a great feature, although the donkey carrot box also suffers from this). Likewise, I see now way to build trunks in the autopsy/corpse prep area.
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Planting seeds/fertilizer feels like it was just thrown in at the last second and is objectively terrible. Somehow the window always manages to default to the wrong selected item (you have to select/plant fertalizer, then repeat for seeds). Just put two boxes so we can do it at the same time, sheehs.
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It’s cheaper to build new tools rather than keep sharpening them, eventually. I hate this. I want to be attached to my tools. Tool durability was a questionable design mechanic (or arguably should have been taken out with upgrades).
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Oh, the actual church crafting area also does not have room for a trunk, and needs one (or access to trunk space in the basement). Sheesh.
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Combat isn’t very tactile.
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Alchemy looooool may as well spoil yourself (granted, I started to and still have no earthly idea what I should be doing with it).
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Hauling shit is a huge chore. While you get tech upgrades that improve the yield from things that drop stuff youhave to literally carry (as opposed to stick in your inventory), you can still only carry one of those at a time. It’s frustrating.
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it would be really nice if you wanted to e.g. go repair a bridge or open a shortcut that you could pin the parts requirement so you know what to bring. Or better, I wish I could dial this up on the map.
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I still haven’t figured out fishing. I only managed to get to the reel-in UI once and it was a disaster.
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Crafting actual writing stuff - notes and chapters - is a massive pain because there’s apparently no gamepad command to execute the crafting (on account of the fact that the recipe allows you to substite materials of a different quality). It’s bizzaro.
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I really hate having to remember which vendors sell what. It’s not always obvious.
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Need more fast travel options than “home” and the village tavern.
Despite all of this, a lot of the game works. The graphics are terrific and very different from Stardew. I like having so many different things to do. It scratches a different itch than Stardew because time isn’t hanging over you. It just needed more time in EA.
I wouldn’t call it a dud either.
It doesn’t have as much charm as Stardew valley, and some of the things you do feel more like a grind despite having a bigger variety of things to do. It’s got technical issues, but they’ve been minor and a couple have been fixed already. It also has some sound effects that make me want to put an ice pick in my ear but… there is something kind of compelling about unlocking technologies and just getting stuff done.
Just FYI, there are “trunks” you can build in those areas.
Church basement gets “Book cases” that can store anything, and Mortuary gets something too I can’t remember what it’s called off the top of my head. You have to tech into them.
I agree with all of your bullet points about the game, but I do have to mention that I’m having a lot of fun playing in spite of those concerns.
Discovered this after typing it all up. Mortuary is the Mortuary Rack. It’s annoying that you have to tech into this stuff. And there’s still nothing for the church proper (at least so far, heh).
Although props for the rack, when you start putting items into storage there it gets cool visual updates.
Been playing the game some. It’s free via Xbox Game Pass. The basics are all there but lacking polish.
This is explained, kind of, when you are first introduced to the beauty mechanic. The game says something about how the person lived affecting beauty and explains the badness meter. It mentions offhand that taking things out can help improve the body. In my experience taking the blood out has made all my corpses nearly perfect, although I’m still early in the game.
Trying to take out the skull was a disaster… I must have rolled a critical miss because it permanently made the body really bad.
Unless you really really like figuring stuff out for yourself, definitely head to the wiki to read up on the autopsy (and alchemy) mechanics.
There are certain things that are chancey to take out, some always bad, some always good…
I’ve been doing the figure it out route. It’s not intuitive. I mean these tech trees are interesting and opening up content is what keeps me going. Inventory management is a bear.
On the other hand, I’ve gotten pretty good at carrying a slab or log and pushing 2 others back to my home.
If you happen to get a gold star story. Hang on to it! Someone will need one for a quest. I sorely regret using mine up to make a gold star prayer I don’t use.
The screenshots and videos look great
But this means I’ll probably never play it:
Even though I enjoyed what little there was, the game feels unfinished in its current state. Not only are there tons of bugs and performance issues, but entire sections of the game that were hinted to be in Graveyard Keeper during development didn’t make it into the final product. There are a few minor examples, but the biggest are the Town and the Fort. All throughout the game these places are mentioned by npcs in passing and eventually your even given specific items and quests that should allow you to go there. But you can’t. Why? Because they simply aren’t in the game.
When I it first experienced these issues myself I hoped that the missing game pieces would simply be added in later updates, but according to the game devs, neither locations were ever meant to be in the game despite being teased constantly that they were. They seemed to regard the whole thing as a joke.