The player takes the role of a person hit by a car and awakes to find himself taking care of a dilapidatedmedieval cemetery. The player manages their character's time and energy levels as they clear brush, dig graves and place headstones, keep honeybees, craft goods, mine for stone and metal, and engage in social activities with the various residents of the small village, all while earning in-game money to expand their graveyard. The game is open-ended, allowing the player to take on activities as they see fit.
Gameplay
Graveyard Keeper is a graveyard-keeping simulation gameinspired by Stardew Valley and based on Harvest Moon. At the start of the game, the player becomes the recipient of a plot of land including a small graveyard once owned by his predecessor near a small town. The cemetery plot is initially overrun with boulders, trees, stumps, and weeds, and the player must work to clear them in order to restart its operation, tending to graves and even the church so as to generate revenue and bring donations to church coffers. Your ultimate goal is to get your character back to his old world. To that end, you need information and help from various NPCs, whom you will be trying to please them, or do their quests. Such quests usually involves gameplay elements like bringing them some crafted or collectable items like oil, honey etc. More gameplay elements and areas slowly unlock throughout the game as you unlock new technologies. The skill tree in this games is called a Technology Tree, and you unlock new technologies to progress in the game. Beyond the early game, Graveyard Keeper requires you to have three different types of experience points: Red, Blue, and Green to unlock most of the technologies. Other than tending to graves and clearing out environmental elements, the game also has farming, smithing, rudimentary combat, multi-level dungeon, fishing, and an extensive crafting system.
The DLC for Graveyard Keeper, "Breaking Dead" was announced in 2018 free for owners of the base game. A resurrection table is added to your morgue, and you can reanimate corpses and set them to work on any of the many ongoing tasks that fuel your enterprise, from gathering stone and wood, to crafting items and writing books, as well as taking care of your garden and hauling merchandise to market. With enough zombies of high enough quality, it becomes possible to automate your entire supply chain, leaving you free to focus on progressing through the main storyline. A second, paid DLC called "Stranger Sins" was released on October 28, 2019, which finally begins to explain the back-story of the strange world in which you find yourself, particularly the Ancient Contract you keep hearing about. It introduces a new Tavern for you to manage by producing and selling food and drink in large quantities at excellent prices, and an entirely new quest-chain which adds personalities to many of the previously-silent villagers. It also adds a new ending for completing the main game after finishing the DLC questline.
