I am ~10 hours into Graveyard Keeper, and the game is just not clicking with me. I have spent the entire time feeling as though I'm somehow playing it wrong, yet I still feel compelled to play it. Given the obvious inspiration from Stardew Valley, I believe that comparing the two will help me vocalize my issues and explain this discrepancy.

I want to like Graveyard Keeper, but after 10 hours with the game, I still haven't clicked with it. There is an ongoing sense that I'm playing it wrong somehow, even as I feel compelled to continue playing it. Given the obvious influence Graveyard Keeper takes from Stardew Valley, it's worth comparing the two to focus my complaints and resolve this discrepancy.

The most persistently felt difference between the two games is in their respective crafting and building systems. Whereas Stardew Valley's crafting takes place mostly within the player's inventory, Graveyard Keeper's relies on a series of interlinked workshops for producing its components. Those components can be used either for further recipes or for assembling new buildings. There is an element of supply chain management in Graveyard Keeper, which I find a worthwhile addition. Several of my favorite games — Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, Satisfactory, and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, to name a few — require the player to manage complex supply chains as part of their gameplay loops.

This complexity, however, clashes with the game's building system. Unlike Stardew Valley, which allows buildings to be placed almost anywhere, buildings in Graveyard Keeper can only be placed in a specific segment of the map. Worse, only a small subset of those map tiles count as valid building locations. The resulting lack of expressiveness is painfully felt. Sure, it would be silly to have a circular saw in the middle of the church or to blockade the already cramped cellar corridors with stonecutting workbench, but why is the player barred from truly designing their own graveyard layout? Are they really customizing the church when there are only six specific places to put pews? Construction in Graveyard Keeper feels like snapping together prefabricated parts rather than true customization.

Before the player can dig into either game's crafting system, they must first acquire raw resources. As an example, let's consider chopping trees and gathering wood. Both games have different tiers of wood sources, some of which can be harvested immediately and some of which require new tools or skills. In Stardew Valley, the two are visually distinct, and attempting to chop the higher tier yields the message, “Your axe isn't strong enough to break this.” The rejection is clear and actionable without spoonfeeding the player information; they know they need to upgrade their axe but not told to which level or even how to perform the upgrade. It also seeds options for near-future activities. Upgrading the axe requires metal bars, which means diving into the mines, and so on.

Graveyard Keeper's wood nodes are harder to tell apart, especially when starting out. The most reliable way is to walk up to one and check the action icon — if there's no lock, then that tree can be cut down. The failure message is similarly vague: “Need a technology.” Figuring out which technology can be a difficult prospect, as we will discuss in the next section. Humorously, it appears that the Keeper himself says it out loud. The whole thing reads less like the Keeper lacks the right skill or tool and more like he suddenly forgot how to use his axe after cutting down five identical trees without issue.

It is also unclear to me how, when, or even if resource nodes regenerate in Graveyard Keeper. This may be because I haven't yet played for long, but it definitely contributes to the sense of playing the game wrong. What if I burn through all of the available wood smelting ores before realizing I needed it for another project? This is never a concern in Stardew Valley. Trees can be replanted manually but will also fairly quickly spread by themselves (indicated visually by buried seeds nearby); stick and stones reappear on the farm at the start of each season; the mines are generated randomly with each descent; and the quarry partially repopulates each day.

At first glance, Graveyard Keeper looks like “dark Stardew Valley”, but that characterization undersells the experience (aside from the eye-rolling opening sequence). It is fun to play as a sketchy village preacher who can use the bodies in his cemetery for strange experiments. There is a particular menace to the setting's broader institutions: witches are publicly burned at the stake, the region has a shortage of quality food, and an authoritarian Church looms over all. It's a great foundation upon which to build some dark humor.

Stardew Valley was hardly lacking in humor, but Graveyard Keeper has a pervasive comedic sensibility. For example, early in the game, the Bishop tells the Keeper that preaching is all about saying whatever comes to mind. Is this a hamfisted attempt at satire? Perhaps, but it's still a fun and goofy contrast to the otherwise monolithic Church. Or take Gerry, a partially amnesiac talking skull who may have once been in the Keeper's shoes — well, back when he still had feet, anyway. The opening hour establishes him as a chaotic and somewhat unreliable entity and sets up a solid dynamic between him and the Keeper.

Unfortunately, the game then indefinitely parks him in the morgue to be a decorative paperweight begging for a stiff drink. Actually, I would prefer if he were begging for the drink. In reality, he has had absolutely nothing to say since he requested the drink, much like the other NPCs who have issued the Keeper chores. He could at least make offhand comments about being so thirsty that the corpse blood looks appetizing when talked to. It's a bizarre waste of a talking skull.

Speaking of missed opportunities, the game has a notable lack of flavor text, particularly in item descriptions. Not only could flavor texts be used to build upon that comedic tone, they could also give the player subtle clues about where to use the respective items. Text more broadly can be something of a disappointment given the localization effort. We won't belabor the point here, but typos and grammatical mistakes are peppered throughout. Far more problematic is when items are occasionally referenced by multiple unrelated names. For example, the autopsy is an autopsy table in the autopsy menu, but it's a preparation place in the morgue's build menu and the skill tree. While uncommon, this issue does make parsing some story tasks more difficult. When Snake keeps skulking around the cellar demanding a key, does he mean the Keeper's key the astrologer gave me, or does he mean another key?