Graveyard Keeper 12+

This is a fun game, with a lot of activities, and a “play when you want” sort of dynamic, which I find useful. You don’t need to be logging in every day if you don’t want to do so, which can work better if your schedule is full.

Two items knock the rating of this title down. First, if you don’t find graverobbing, cannibalism, witch burning, and similar topics humorous on some level, you will not enjoy it. In many cases, these are not presented as moral choices with viable alternatives, but required activities. If something hits one of your buttons, there’s not really a great way to get around it.

Second, the Cultist perk does not work on mobile devices, from everything I can find online. Later in the game, this breaks the core activity of graveyard keeping to the point it’s not worth pursuing any further, unless you want to do constant save scumming. Instead, one is driven to finish the main story out of sheer boredom.

Love the game and its quirkinesses-better and more open ended than Stardew valley, IMHO (which I also love).

A couple of things for the developers to note:

1. The controls have two issues. First, they offer too much range of motion, so it’s difficult to travel in a straight line or with any precision (not a big deal, bu could be better). Second, and worse, there is a delay in responsiveness when you hit something, like a crafting table, which takes half a second or so for the controller to reactivate. This means that some operations, like putting blocks of stone on the stone table, are not as quick or smooth as they could be.

2. I have not seen any crashes - at all - in playing for 2 days (I am just about to do the gold star sculpture quest for The Bishop), but if you exit the game in the middle of a day and it unloads (or restarts), you will lose your progress for the day.

3. The crafting and technology system is complex, which makes knowing what you need in the technology tree unnecessarily difficult. For example, you often need two technologies unlocked to do something, like the skill to quarry marble and then to sculpt it. I know this is more realistic, but I often have to consult a website to know what is what!

Other than that, great fun and highly recommended.

Is worth more than the current 2.9 rating.

This game is definitely really great. I like the idea, I like the mechanics, and I love the polished look of it.
I HATE the controls. I don’t like the touch controls(too imprecise) and when I tried to use a controller, I broke the game a couple of times(I couldn’t do anything else, no matter what button I pushed). There definitely needs to be a better option for what’s possible with a controller, and if it’s not recommended to use a controller, that needs to be stated.
Update: I bumped my rating down because of an unsurpassable bug. I have had no crashes whatsoever, there have been NO BUGS whatsoever up to this point. I’ve been playing this game for 20 hours, and I get to a bug that completely freezes the game and makes it impossible to go forward.
When the bug happens, my phone info (software, hardware) appears on the left side of the screen. The game continues to work (music still playing, body was delivered) I’m just unable to move.