I Like the Donkey

I’ve been trying with Graveyard Keeper, I really have. It’s a really nice game, pretty well crafted though it has a few glaring errors like misaligned text and typos. It’s pretty, it’s funny, has a neat story and setting, interesting characters, a crafting system; all sorts of things that I like in a game. But this morning, after playing for a while, I shut the game off because I didn’t want to play any more.

I quit because I didn’t know what to do next, and honestly, that’s my biggest complaint about the game. I have spent a lot of time standing in one place, thinking, trying to plot out what my next move is. At first, it was part of the fun of the game, trying to figure out how to complete these different tasks, but now I’m just lost. I have tasks to complete that I don’t even remember why I want to complete them. I have tasks to complete that I cannot figure out how to make or buy the materials needed. But when I got an item I was looking for from an NPC I wasn’t expecting to have it, I knew I was in trouble. I felt that the game had drifted into point-and-click adventure mode.

It’s actually really similar to the old point-and-click adventure games. In those games, you could progress until you had solved some sort of puzzle, either by finding a new thing to click on, talking to a character, or giving a character an item. It’s a perfectly serviceable framework for a game, but the problem is that usually there is no association between the puzzle pieces you are trying to connect. Or at least, a few subtle clues. Who is going to want this Red Hat? Someone will, so you doggedly carry it around, trying to give it to every NPC you meet, until someone takes it, usually exchanging it for another puzzle piece. If you’re lucky, the environmental puzzles will require some logic, but sometimes they feel completely random as well.

Anyway, it’s not my favorite kind of game, I think that’s coloring my view of Graveyard Keeper. But it really is too opaque for its own good. At the start of the game, I needed logs. According to my tech tree, logs were a resource I got from a specific skill, so I tried to get that skill. But to get that skill, I needed to be further along in the game, and have unlocked other things. I ended buying my logs and carrying them from the village back to my house. It seemed like a lot of work for wood.

Then I discovered you could dig up stumps for 0 to 2 logs. Later, I discovered that there are half grown trees that you can cut down to get logs as well, you just can’t cut down the full-grown trees without the special skill. So for several hours I struggled with logs, and I was surrounded by them.

And some of the systems are opaque enough that I haven’t fully cracked them, even though I’ve used them a couple of times. I need to study a key, but suddenly I need Science Points to do so, and I don’t know what those are or where they come from. I thought I figured out how to get them, but then it didn’t work the second time for some reason.

The bundle I bought was the base game with all of the DLCs, which are installed and active by default, which make the tech tree even more complicated and convoluted. And now I have tasks that are referring to things that I don’t even understand. And I’m still not even quite sure how to get the research points in the first place.

I’ll probably come back to it. There are enough intriguing puzzles and systems that it is fun to tinker with them. Unfortunately, it’s just too frustrating to spend gaming time standing in one spot, trying to figure out where I want to go because I can’t figure out what to do.