Basically a crafting game, if you're into that sort of thing. "You need this to make one of these then you need some of those to make one of these" kind of thing. First focus on upping the "quality" (points) of your graveyard, then your church, while meeting the townspeople and maintaining friendship by competing quests. This will get you the reputation and momentum you need. It took me some time but I really really enjoy it. You need to really get into it, gather your resources, expand the map and discover the plot to judge it fairly. If you like Stardew, this is similar but on a smaller level. Not as flexible or expansive though, at the moment at least.

I basically beat this game out of hatred. It does not respect your time and the wiki is the only way to get most of the information you need to do anything. When I finally did beat the base game, you get a big 'haha look at all these things we teased but never delivered, good thing there will be DLCs' and the biggest twist is the DLCs DON"T EXPLORE THE TEASED THINGS. Amazing.

Graveyard keeping is not what this game is about sadly.

It's great if you love repetition and slowly automating everything. I do feel like a lot of it isn't needed. I never really saw a point to fish for example. I love it when the game is a Re-Animator style mad scientist simulator and not Stardew Valley.

Reached a game breaking bug of the corpses being invisible, making it impossible to continue or complete the game after around 8 hours. I can't recommend it due to this.

what a brilliant game this is , 90 hours enjoyed every damn second .
i don't know how this game skipped me all of these years .. epic journey through an amazing story . 10/10

fun RPG
the humor is great.
The earlygame feels a bit too much like walking simulator, but things being hard makes it that much more rewarding when they get easy.
Be warned: save before doing the ending cut scene... it will just yeet you to main menu.

I was told I would run a cemetary but for some reason I am now a farmer with my only livestock being zombies. Harvest “meat”, blood, fat and but them sonbeetches to work. Oh, you also make burgers to sell to other live humans.

Graveyard Keeper is Stardew Valley's depressing cousin. While Stardew keeps you busy with rewarding activities, this game feels like a full-time job.
The grind is relentless and often feels pointless. Everything is locked behind complex technic trees that require "blue points" which are a nightmare to collect. You spend ages walking slowly across the map just to realize you forgot one iron ingot, forcing you to waste even more time, Instead of the "just one more day" you get a "how much longer is this going to take type of feeling. It’s a slow, repetitive time-sink that lacks the charm and constant sense of progress its just feels boring.

Unfortunately I learned 30 hours and two DLCs in that devs are now AI Andies, the sequel is coded using cursor (an AI service)

Huge bummer, really putting the Lazy in Lazy Bear Games.

Never have a game made me feel like I'm wasting time, even tho I'm unemployed.

I genuinely wanted to explore and love this game, it has a lot of interesting stuff and ideas, and a really great funny premise that really hooked me. But it just kept punishing me for trying to explore and do stuff on my own.

During my 30hrs gameplay time (split over multiple times trying to get into the game), it ALWAYS kept dangling the thing I wanted to do in front of me. And it generally just keeps limiting your ability to actually explore the game yourself, or do stuff on your own before putting serious time doing the storyline (which unlocks important stuff throughout) and time learning every mundane mechanic (and consistently looking up wikis/guides for crucial information that's almost never mentioned). Combine that with the utterly slow gameplay loop and mechanics, and the fact that you can pretty much near-softlock if you don't follow the main questline, that spans HOURS before you can do start doing your own thing (deviate a little and you will have to skip around for weeks in-game to get purple potions and other stuff like that). And you quickly realize it's just not a good, time-respecting experience.
And I really like and enjoy chill games.

Maybe this could work for console-like environment where you just play over multiple sessions just to chill and wind-down.

Oh and you need to buy the DLCs to help automate parts of the "time wastes", along with a lot of other QoL addition that are frankly essential. Fun.