Got a free code from a friend, then ended up buying all the DLC cuz i was having fun.
It's definitely not for everyone. There are a LOT of tasks that need doing if you want to progress. That's not including the tasks that each DLC adds.

All said tasks will have you running around like a headless chicken. Several NPCs only show up on specific days of the week, so you'll do one task, need to wait, so you start another task, and totally forget you were doing the first one.
Now stack that like five times.
Other then the NPCs moving around each weekday, there's no time limit.
You have an energy bar, but you can sleep whenever you want and food is easy to get.

However the crafting is *extremely* tedious. It'll prob take you several IRL days to get your first zombie, and thats not including the infrastructure needed to make said zombie useful, just to slowly automate *PART* of ONE task.
I have fun because it keeps my brain busy trying to keep track of everything i need to do. But i can see it being very frustrating for a lot of people

After playing through Stardew Valley I was looking for something similar and found this.
These games are hardly comparable though and if Stardew Valley was the benchmark, Graveyard Keeper would be a 6.5/10 for me.

Why:
- Quests are seemingly endless, one quest leads to another and it just keeps going and it becomes very convoluted. In addition to that they are quite monotenous. This wouldn't be a problem if it only took 20hrs, but after around 100hrs it's getting really boring. Quests also require you to do things you don't really want to do... just know there is no choice, the story is a one-way road.

- Villagers are also not too interesting and interactions are limited to quest dialog and trading although I can't figure out why some items in their vendor inventories are always greyed out. Also some dialog is still available even though the quest item it talks about is already aquired/the quest has already finished. (e.g. I can ask about the Town Pass long after I aquired it, asking about it removes the dialog option)

- The questlog is quite sparce with information and at times I needed the wiki to progress. One time a Quest NPC was removed through progressing the main game and I couldn't progress the DLC after that, turns out I can finish the DLC quest by asking the post box in front of the church... this could have been done better.

- items become really cumbersome, quest items for finishing the main quest have to be stored somewhere, armour and equipment items can aparently not get detroyed, dismantled or sold. So they just keep eating up space, which might possibly soft lock you? (why is this even a thing...this really should have been done better)

- In addition to the "finale" of the main quest being quite disappointing for the time spent, finishing the main quest also doesn't rid you of the required 6 items, there is no "after", you just load the latest save from before finishing when you want to continue playing the game... this could have been done better.

- automating processes using zombies is fine (although sadly limited to specific tasks). The day-length felt way too short without them, so they become quite necessary to make stuff so you can actually play and enjoy the game.

- Strength/Dexterity/Intelligence feels a bit out of balance. In the beginning I never had Intelligence to progress so I spam-bought Attribute Books at the Alchemist, later I needed tons of Strength and needed to buy those Attribute Books, but I never really needed Dexterity? I now have 500 Strength and Intelligence and 3000+ Dexterity.

- Crafting can be queued and that is amazing, it's clunky and doesn't work 100% of the time (maybe playing with Controller was the problem, didn't investigate though), but it's the way you want to make items. It doesn't work at all, with crafts that let you pick ingredients though. This makes them very annoying to make in bulk... this should have been done better.

- A weird thing I noticed was framerate-drops. While not really an issue for this type of game I was quite irritated about dips from my locked 120FPS down to sometimes just 80FPS with noticable stuttering when it happened. I'd have expected this game to run solid on any potato and I'm playing on a PC way above and beyond recommended hardware (R7 5800X3D + RTX 3080 Ti).


I probably have around 20 hrs more to play to finish DLC, but I'm currently quite bored and burned out, so I probably won't finish it completely.

I'll recommend it, but please wait for a sale. I've had fun with it overall, but there are said problems.
Just put it on the wishlist and wait for the "Last Journey Edition" to be around 20 bucks. The DLC are cool, but not 10 bucks each kind of cool, and the end of the base game is quite disappointing and probably the reason quite a few people wouldn't recommend this game.

I've been coming back and forth to this game for many years now, having originally bought it on the Nintendo switch. To me the tone and the kind of tongue in cheek humor sets it apart from, say Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley.

Pixel art is neat and the gameplay loop entertaining, being expanded by the dlcs that even though have the corniest names, they're good, perhaps the downside is as a friend said, they make the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ story longer so he can't seem to finish the game. It seems to me that the story pace is interrupted by large amounts of grind in between, now this can be good or bad depending on whether you enjoy the gameplay mechanics and/or want to complete everything. If you are coming from Harvest Moon you are probably familiar with the pacing as that game took forever as well, yet it was enjoyable, so what's to complain here really?

The main hook for me is that it isn't simply a farm sim, it is varied enough so that you can participate in many activities. Also every interaction is funny and includes adult jokes. Downside is that some texts have rough grammar issues or straight up have missing words, I know I shouldn't be one to talk about grammar but I'm just some fool on the internet while a game studio kind of should have QA testers for this? Anyway the game is good enough for this to be a deal breaker. One technical detail though is that on steam deck cloud saves don't work out of the box, you have to force the game to run on proton experimental to access cloud saves.