Graveyard Keeper: Ultimate Collector’s Edition [Xbox]

24 Dec

Lazy Bear Games’ Graveyard Keeper is a graveyard-management sim, with action-adventure RPG elements, where you play as a man who inherits a graveyard from his predecessor after his untimely death. With Gerry, a talking skull, by your side, you’ll learn the ways of a Graveyard Keeper, such as performing autopsies to extract flesh from corpses to make burgers; building gravesites and interring corpses; decorating and keeping their graves in good condition to increase the quality of your graveyard; and more.

With three expansions included within the Ultimate Collector’s Edition, these flesh things out quite a bit, with Breaking Dead giving you the ability to reanimate corpses to help out around the graveyard; Stranger Sins adds new quests and the ability to build and run your very own Tavern; and Game of Crone requires you to assist escaped prisoners, providing them with shelter and sustenance as they defend themselves against the Inquisition, whilst you investigate a series of mysterious vampire attacks.

Visually, it has a look very reminiscent of one of its inspirations: Stardew Valley, with a large, gorgeous world filled with things to do and people to meet. Sadly there’s no mini-map to keep track of your location in the world, so getting from place to place can sometimes feel like a bit more of a challenge than you’d expect, especially before you’re totally familiar with the areas yet.

Naturally, given the subject matter, and the presence of your talking skull-friend, Gerry - there’s a lot of dark, macabre humour throughout, and the main story is interesting, although easy to lose track of if you go down the rabbit-hole of side-quests and just pottering about in the world. The soundtrack, by Hamza el Hamri, is fantastic with a very calming, soothing vibe to it.

There’s a lot to keep you busy, from maintaining the look of your graveyard to disposing of rotten corpses in the river, as well as completing the vast array of main and side-quests available, it’s a very in-depth game. You’ll learn new skills as you progress, and unlock new blueprints for things to make and utilise, and as long as you’re willing to give it the time - it will definitely keep you going. It’s not a quick game by any stretch of the imagination, it is very complex and requires a lot of tasks to be completed to make progress, but this can be done at your own pace, making it quite relaxing as opposed to the constant rush against the clock that you find in many other ‘management-sims’.

Graveyard Keeper: Ultimate Collector’s Edition includes the base game, as well as the three expansions: Breaking Dead, Stranger Sins and Game of Crones, for the price of £33.49 on the Xbox Store, a saving of £3.47 versus buying them all separately. Overall, we really enjoyed our time with Graveyard Keeper, and can see it being one we keep coming back to regularly.