I can think of no job I would not want than being the one who has to operate and care for a cemetery. People dying to meet you, working the graveyard shift, having a bunch of working stiffs as coworkers, putting the fun back in funerals, noisy nights with all the coffins, playing formaldehyde and seek with corpses, dealing with grave issues, getting buried in the work, OK I’ll stop with the puns. Lazy Bear Games and Tinybuild have taken these worries and put them together into the dark comedy simulation Graveyard Keeper: Last Journey Edition. The Last Journey Edition includes the main game Graveyard Keeper and all the DLCs, Breaking Dead, Stranger Sins, Game of Crone, and the new Better Save Souls).
Graveyard Keeper follows the strange tale of a man who died while rushing to get home and is sent into a medieval world where he is now the Keeper of the local Graveyard with the guidance of Gerry, a talking skull with amnesia and a thirst for booze. Now players will have to maintain the grounds of the Graveyard, run the church, take care of the remains (being dropped off by a Marxist donkey, I’M NOT MAKING THAT UP!), and handle side missions provided to you by the NPCs.
Now onto the game itself. When it comes to the controls for Graveyard Keeper, it’s best to take your time, it’s going to be intimidating at first as you’re kind of dropped in the middle of everything and before you know it you start to rack up quests. This is a marathon, so don’t feel like you have to rush.
The soundtrack is really good and fits with the game’s story and look. The game has no spoken dialogue which is a shame because some of the lines I’ve read are pretty damn funny and could only imagine how much better they would sound being read by a talented voice actor!
The art of Graveyard Keeper is a lot like a Nintendo handheld game, if you know you know. The graphics may not be what I usually like, but for this game, it works and adds a bit of charm to it.
Overall gameplay is pretty fun once I got past being a bit concerned at the start with how overwhelming the start felt but the more I played, the more fun I started to have. There’s a day/night cycle where on certain days you can meet certain people elsewhere OR have visits at the Graveyard, there is some combat in the game where you can do some good old fashion hack-and-slash when you’re not gathering resources to build and repair what you need.
Overall, Graveyard Keeper is a…well… Keeper. With the Last Journey Edition with all the DLCs, I can see players having a decent journey ahead of them if they have no games they want to play in the meantime, hell, this would be a decent game to play around Halloween, to be honest. On my scale of 1-10, with loads of play time and things to do in-game, witty dialogue and dark humor, decent art/graphics, and a great soundtrack dwarf what I did not like about the game big time, I give Graveyard Keeper: The Last Journey Edition an 8.5/10!
Graveyard Keeper: The Last Journey Edition is out now for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
