Graveyard Keeper is a glorious, sinister game about dealing with the dead
Graveyard Keeper is a wonderful thing, even in its current alpha state. You can tell what you're in for just by glancing at the patch notes on the home screen: "Fixed crash when extracting brain/fat/etc." I love that breezy "etc." "Fixed camera freeze when talking to Astrologer." And the home screen itself is no less delightful than the patch notes: night-time in a medieval village done up in pixel-art. The edges of a church and a waterfall are picked out in blue, lit by the nearby moon. It is a calm, but somehow potent view: the promise of morbid adventure. It reminds me a bit of that sense of expectation you get wandering around Melee Island at night.
You arrive in Graveyard Keeper from the modern world, where you are in love and in traffic and not very good at watching where you are going. Following an auto collision you awake in a medieval village and find yourself in charge of a small rundown graveyard. Every day a new body arrives from a wry, socialist donkey. Every afternoon there are tutorial tips to engage with, dispensed by a talking skull who seems to have been a bit of a boozer in his past life.
The pitch, I think, is Stardew Valley meets Six Feet Under. The graveyard needs fixing up - a process that will require the steady accumulation of resources and the unlocking of the skills needed to make anything handy of them - while the nearby village is filled with eccentrics and tantalising mysteries. Graveyard Keeper is particularly good at dangling threads, in fact: the local pub owner tells you that a nearby Astrologer may be of help to you; the church in the graveyard is locked, but may be accessible if you dig your way into its crypt. I am a few hours in and there are so many separate things I am working towards. The inquisition is in town: do I want to become a spy? Do I want to take on a garden as well as my graveyard? Do I want to see what's going on over by the nearby lighthouse?
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