Graveyard Keeper's biggest problem is that very few things are intuitive. You can either sell your creations, eat them yourself or hand them over to townsfolk in quests. You gain red points for manual labour, green points from farming and blue points for fulfilling tasks that require intelligence, for example proper burial services.Īpart from the graveyard, you get to grow crops and cook food. Technologies unlock using three different kinds of points. The philosophy of Graveyard Keeper in one image. Some of them appear in the technology menu from the beginning, others you'll only know about if someone tells you about them. To be able to unlock technologies, you have to know about them first. Speaking of spare parts: in order to gather almost any material, you will have to learn the corresponding technology, which is just another term for acquiring the necessary knowledge, if you will, and then build the appliance through which your item in question can be created. Instead, you get this strange duality between respecting the dead and turning them into quarter pounders and supplies for spare parts. Graveyard Keeper doesn't aspire to be the next A Mortician's Tale, but opening the church could have been used in context, as an example of moving from a questionable practice to the real thing. Draining humans of their blood for potions and chucking flailed bodies into the river to make space didn't sit right with me at all, especially due to the laissez faire approach to doing these things. However, I discovered that I was curiously squeamish about the execution of Graveyard Keeper's central idea. I will concede that normally you don't question why a management sim asks you to do certain things. Why you would do that? Because you were told to. You have to reach a certain rating to reopen the church next to the plot. The graveyard has a rating, influenced by the materials used to build graves (a gravestone rates higher than a wooden cross, for example) and what condition the buried body is in. Your first task is to raise the rating of the graveyard, in other words, to clean it up. Environments look great, especially when the weather changes. It took me about five hours to understand its core mechanics, because the game told me what to do, but not how to get there. Graveyard Keeper shows you how to dig around in a body, how to build a gravesite and where to sell burial certificates for money, and from then on, it stays completely shtum. Or rather, you would, if only you knew how. A talking donkey comes by and drops a corpse at your porch, the local bishop tells you to clean up the graveyard, and so you roll up your sleeves and get to it. Your task is to find a way home, but also to mostly just roll with it. The story is an afterthought: your character gets hit by a car one day and wakes in a different world to a sentient skull pronouncing him the keeper of the local graveyard. To get to that point however, a lot of other things need to happen first. In Dungeon Keeper, you build S&M parlours to keep your populace happy, in Graveyard Keeper you.turn dead people into lunchmeat. Instead, it's likely going for that slightly tongue-in-cheek tone of a Tropico or Dungeon Keeper, asking you to suspend your disbelief and explore all the ways in which you can adapt familiar management mechanics to the theme. The game is neither sad nor drab, even though it has you handling dead bodies. The fun tone is presented as Graveyard Keeper's biggest draw. Availability: Out now on PC and Xbox One.Graveyard Keeper, then, sounded like the kind of game I didn't know I wanted, something that combines the cute style of a game made in RPG Maker with a truly interesting management idea. With the current renaissance of the farming sim however, it's enough to loudly say "Stardew Valley" three times to summon interest - mine included. Whether you like to manage cities, zoos, hospitals or sports teams, there are plenty of riffs on the concept. Management simulations have been one of the most enduring video game genres. Arcane busywork leaves little room for genuine pleasure in this fascinating and frustrating genre oddity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |