Graveyard Keeper

Review

How about that for a strike of bad luck! After a hard day at work, you’re on the way to the supermarket to pick up ingredients for dinner. After paying for your shopping, you make your way through a busy strip when suddenly, your better half rings you on this incredible invasive device known as the mobile or cell phone. Without noticing where you are on the street and without thinking twice as you look at the beautiful creature on the screen of this diabolic instrument, you are struck by a car while crossing a busy intersection. Don’t you remember your parents saying, “look to your left before crossing the road”?  (It would be, look to your right, if you are from a strange little island known as England or the big one in the southern hemisphere known as Australia). Well, it doesn’t really matter now, as you wake up in a strange world with the new job title of Graveyard Keeper!

Graveyard Keeper is a RPG / adventure game developed by Lazy Bear Games and published by tinyBuild, where you take control of a guy who has been run over by a car while on his way home, and ends up in a strange world as a graveyard keeper.

The game starts in a foggy background, with your character having a conversation with a fellow dressed in black.  You’ll receive your first task, which is to dig Gerry up from his grave for some help. At this point, your character wakes up thinking it was a bad dream. Well, he will quickly realise that his dream has become a reality.

Early on, the world map will consist of the keeper’s workshop, the morgue, the church with a graveyard, a village, a wheat farm and a light house. The rest of the map will be hidden by clouds and he will have to either repair bridges or clear out paths to access other locations. To do so, he will have to develop his own workshop to be able to create a certain number of parts, such as wooden planks, nails and other specific items required to do so. There are plenty of things to build in this game, but the keeper will have to learn technologies to unlock new items. This process will take him a fair bit of time as he has to earn points to purchase each technology. He will acquire points by crafting items (red points), chopping wood, mining (green points) and spiritual (blue) which are the hardest to collect. There are seven types of technology to learn, including food, farming and anatomy.

The keeper will be able to build new products at the build tables (workshop, church, morgue, cellars and catacombs) only after discovering their blueprints, which also takes time.

He will have to successfully complete tasks given to him by other characters within the world, which will increase his reputation with each of them. This will grant him access to new items from these people, as well as rewards, which you can use in a further quest. Make sure to read each of the conversations between the keeper and the other characters carefully, as they will outlay all the hints on how to complete each task.

One of the funny things in this game is that the calendar; it is circular and divided into six parts, with each part representing one day.  The edge of the circle has a symbol attached to each of the six sections.  The middle of the circle has a picture of a house, with the surrounding sky gradually changing from day to night as the time goes by. There is a blue bar on the right-hand side of the circle which represents the keeper’s energy.  Each time he creates an item, cuts a tree, digs a grave, does an autopsy etc, the gauge will decrease, and he will either need to eat food or go to bed to fill the energy back up.  If he decides to go on an adventure away from his house during the night, he may encounter bats and/or other creatures, and will need to fight them off. He’ll need to make sure he avoids their attacks as they can injure him gravely; use his own sword attack wisely as each swing will decrease his energy bar.

I must say that I was not grabbed at first by this game, as it takes a serious amount of time to get somewhere. The main reason for this is that the energy bar gets used very quickly, so I needed to send the keeper to bed before the day was over. The good news is that it will automatically save the game each time you take a nap.

As I progressed, the game grew on me to the point where I totally lost the sense of time, and found myself in front of my computer until 3am trying to finish a task which involved building more benches for the church to receive additional spiritual and faith points. That my friends, is a miracle, especially for a person like myself, as I believe in gravity (science) rather than a greater being (theology)!

Graphically the game looks great and the soundtrack is pretty good too. You have the ability to change resolutions and remap the keys as well. The dialogues in this game are really good, with plenty of humour.