Graveyard Keeper 2 gives us a lot of mortuary work to do, but couples that with a lot of depth and charm.
Having to work for 50+ hours per week and driving for like 20 usually means I want to stay the hell away from anything that forces me to do things for other people. It’s 2026! Work sucks! I want to zone out!
So somehow tinyBuild’s Graveyard Keeper 2 is work, and working for other people, and a lot of it — and yet it lets me zone out.
This is a direct sequel to the game known as Graveyard Keeper, a cozy tower defense life sim with a lot of blood and undead, so the necessity to maintain what makes the first game enjoyable means the overall core of this sequel hasn’t changed, but it has been updated and refined a bit. There have been quality of life adjustments, like some of the automation and UI features.
If it’s not broken, etc etc
This time though the game’s plot and story are much more flushed out and in-depth. The whole thing is an isekai, loosely linking modern life to sword and sorcery. It’s really loose, but is there to give us more quests to do and characters to interact with in interesting ways; it’s at least funny and easy to follow along. We’re basically leading everyone we meet into thinking we’re an amazing hero, just so we can keep moving forward in the world to find our way out. It’s a nice little conceit to how to progress the typical hero’s journey. The characters are all great, including Larry the disembodied skull that we keep in a bag. Every time I see an NPC with message notation above their head I want to talk to them because the character writing is good.
It does take a while for the game to kick in though, because the whole opening section goes on too long before we can actually do anything that’s even game-like. That’s indicative of other aspects of the game. As a sequel to a grind heavy game this is still really grind heavy, but for a Type-A person like me it’s surprisingly comforting to Just Do Stuff. We can farm and do autopsies and repair stuff over and over instead of actually rushing to progress the story. There ARE gates that the dev team has included to prevent us from achieving too much too fast, which is a tad bit of a bummer because I like to get OP quickly in games like this, but it’s survivable. It does inflate the game time a bit though, because we could plow through things pretty quickly if it let us, but it doesn’t, extending the game to around 30 hours almost unnecessarily. I appreciate the simplified crafting, but there are a lot of layers of skill trees before we can open up some of the recipes we need.
The battles are kind of fun, though. We can recruit mercenaries or develop our own hordes of undead soldiers to reclaim parts of the town that we have to protect, and there’s enough time between battles and sim that I find myself wanting to get right to a battle sooner.
Graveyard Keeper 2 brings an improved presentation, great little cutscenes, and fun quests both big and small. It’s still kind of basic, but it’s enjoyable comfort food (for zombies).
3/5 ⭐⭐⭐
Good
This review is based on a code sent to the Editor by the Publisher or PR. Read about how we do our reviews here.
