14 DAY TRIAL // 
If you like formaldehyde, and getting caught in the morgue, if you’re not into burning witches, but you can surgically remove brains, if you like cremating bodies at midnight, in the woods on the hill, then this is the game you’ve been looking for, play it and escape. Graveyard Keeper Last Journey Edition is a worthy candidate for paraphrasing the “piña colada song’s” lyrics, since it offers many long hours of immersive escapism, but can it become an undying hit?
Released five years ago, Graveyard Keeper proved to be an indie gem, widely praised, despite its flaws. The Last Journey Edition contains next to the base game all three DLCs released since the launch of the game widely dubbed as a Stardew Valley clone with corpses. While the basics feel just about the same since both games share countless similarities, Graveyard Keeper managed to evolve into an entertaining rabbit hole that will keep you going for dozens of hours.
Because make no mistake, there is no “I am going to play just for an hour or two” with this game. Once you donned the rags of the latest Graveyard Keeper you will be trapped in a web of small tasks that although might look menial, are highly engaging. No matter if you are supplying the village with mystery meat, trying to raise the quality of your crops, trying to make the best wine, fishing around for the proverbial Gold Fish or hanging out, peddling burgers at the weekly witch burning, you will lose track of time.
It all starts with an average Joe hurrying home, but never making it. He does not end up in hell or heaven, not in purgatory, rather in a mysterious land where he is entrusted with the task of looking after the final resting place of others. Next to being a caretaker of the graveyard, soon you will be forced to wear many hats: amateur preacher, gardener, inquisition enabler, brewer, mortician, alchemist and even undying dungeon crawling sword slinger.
Your end goal is to find a way home and get back to your normal life. But your journey is entangled with the stories of the characters around you, forcing you to actively take part in solving various issues for the Bishop, the Astrologer, The Inquisitor, the Merchant and other colorful characters. Once you get to know them better, the gameplay becomes more and more complex, and your duties branch out just as much as the game’s technology trees.
You will find yourself collecting marble, buying silk, toiling away at the carpenter’s table just to be able to upgrade the church. You will grow better and better grapes so you can make the best wine in order to inspire the village’s artists to create stories that can be bound together in a tome required by the Astrologer. And you will also open your own tavern so you can indulge in the archeological hobbies of a talking skull.
Every mechanism is interconnected, and you will be caught in the middle planning and scheming and enjoying almost every moment of it. The pacing is brilliant, and the game manages to present you with new goals just when you are about to be done with it, always challenging you just enough to make you keep on going. And thus, you will end up wondering when the around 70 hours needed to finish the game passed so fast.
As mentioned, this edition also contains all four DLCs of the game, wittily named Breaking Dead, Stranger Sins, Game of Crone and Better Save Soul. These add a couple of dozen hours of the total game time bringing some extremely useful features, but also new bugs that take away a bot from the experience. For example, the introduction of zombie labor eases up considerably the need to grind for resources, freeing you to focus on the more complex aspects of the production chains.
The story DLCs will take you down even further on the road to perdition making you build and run your own tavern, while looking for 17 ancient artifacts, and running a refugee camp of annoying nobles, hunted by the inquisition. These narrative-driven extra content pieces add more of the same experience of the game, with extra mechanics based on the same basics, guarantying the fun of those who loved the extra game.
Unfortunately, the new DLCs could have used a bit more attention since they brought some technical issues that did not plague the base game. For example, on PS5 from time to time the game gets stuck for a millisecond, that sounds like a minor nuisance, except if it catches you while fishing. Trying to follow the pattern of higher tier fish is already annoying, without a momentary freeze that nullifies your effort and throws you off rhythm. Also, there are some game crashes that can be frustrating since the game does not have autosave and only saves when you go to bed.
Esthetically the 16-bit visuals conjure up fuzzy and warm memories banking on our nostalgia. The detailed buildings and surroundings are a pleasure to get lost in while taking in the atmosphere. On the other hand, the UI is as basic as it can be, with unintuitive menus and controls that are far from accurate. The soundtrack does not stand out in any way, and there is no voice acting - the characters do nothing else but mumble.
The Good
- Detailed and beautiful visual style
- Very well written characters
- Rich and interconnected mechanics
The Bad
- The grind can become annoying
- Frustrating technical bugs
- Lack of autosave
Conclusion
With its morbid humor, geeky puns and quirky characters, spiderweb likes mechanics and character arcs, this game managed to grow and stand on its own. There are still moments when it succumbs to grind but snaps out and makes you push forward. With plenty of content and just the right amount of challenge it makes it really hard to put down the controller.
Review key was provided by the publisher.
