Graveyard Keeper review (there will be only minor spoilers)

So, I just finished Graveyard Keeper (without the DLC). Took me 58 hours.

I enjoyed the game all the way until the end. I liked that there were long quest lines with only a few people, rather than 100 minor quests with someone you only talk to once. It really helped weave a story around all of the people you were doing quests for, and made you care a bit more about seeing their quest lines conclude.

So, it's no big secret you make zombies in the game. And therein lies my major complaint.

For most of the things you make zombies for, by the time you can make them, you don't really need them.
I never even bothered making the zombie text generator. By the time I could make it, I already had so many notes and stories, I didn't need a zombie churning them out for me. And though there's a method for making more efficient zombies, it really didn't matter whether I bothered making zombies with max stats or just using any ol' dead body that came my way. They were generating resources faster than I could use them, even with minimum stats.

I ended up with 3 perfect zombies sitting on my mortuary floor, because I never ended up needing them. Don't need to make beer and wine any more? Pull those zombies out and re-purpose them. That kind of thing. Evidently you can also stick zombies on every little crafting station, but it was useless. I would queue up 100 items for them to make, and they'd just make one and stop. I'd have to pull them out, hit "F" to start crafting, spend an energy, and put the zombie back in to slowly finish up. Once you can make food, there's no point. You can make everything yourself and never run out of energy.

Everything in the game takes energy. You get energy back by eating and sleeping. The game has a mechanic to force you to sleep (which also saves the game), but if you 'sleep' at full energy, no time passes. Since food ingredients are plentiful, I'd basically keep my guy up constantly, doing stuff. and every 24 hours or so, take a quick nap at the bed to satisfy the 'need to sleep' requirement.

The same "once you have it, you don't need it" problem goes for crafting.
Once you can craft beer and wine, you only need to do it once or twice, and then never do it again. I crafted booze exactly once for a quest. I didn't use my apple trees at all for anything. And even if you can find a place to sell high-tier items, by the time you can make them, money is no longer an issue.

I do like the fact that there are alternate methods of crafting the same items, but...
There's a 'hard' method and an 'easy' method. Yes, I can get life powder from intestines. And that means 1 a day. Or I can go up to the coal mine seam, and get hundreds of sulfur in a quick mining run in one day. Guess which one I did to make my healing potions? :D
. And the easy way leaves you with such a glut of ingredients, you only really need to do it once or twice. I ended up with literally hundreds of embalming ingredients that I'd never use even if I put zombies and corpses in every available spot.

Lastly, the end of the quest lines:
I like that you needed to wrap up all of the quests to finish the game.
But the mechanic where each person only shows up on a certain day of the week got old once I'd done everything. I was just sitting around waiting for 'their' day. Sure, they made a stone garden to speed time. But that just tells me that they recognized the problem and put in a junky fix. The stone garden doesn't even pass time that quickly. So the last 20 minutes of the game or so went like this: Meditate at the garden til the right day shows up. Go talk to a dude. Go back to the garden to meditate some more.

That said, I'd give the game a 7 or 8 out of 10. Not many games hold my interest long enough to get to the ending.
 
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