Graveyard Keeper was always the kind of game I recommended with a big asterisk attached. It has great bones and a fantastic sense of humour, but the first ten or so hours feel like a giant tutorial, with six different outcomes, and you have to, early on, not mess it up, or you end up playing the entire game while you catch up. Graveyard Keeper 2 is everything I wanted in a sequel by finally trusting the players to go at their own pace, figure out some of the deeper systems themselves, all while not pigeonholing players into a certain style.
The setup is familiar if you’ve spent any time in Graveyard Keeper: You play as an otherworlder, who may or may not be the same protagonist from the first game, who has to take up as a “Keeper” to try and get back to their world. Doing this involves some morally gray graveyard keeping by harvesting organs and bringing bodies back from the dead to bolster your farming automation. What’s changed is how the game introduces you to all of it. The original had this habit of cracking open three or four systems at the same time, like crafting, farming, the tech tree, the quest board, and just trusting you to sort it out. It worked for the most part for certain people, but it buried a lot of good ideas under friction that didn’t need to be there.
Graveyard Keeper 2 paces the unlocks with a lot more restraint and trust in the player. Even then, there are a ton of new mechanics, like Zombies (unlocks in the first game’s DLC) that give your farm some automation, and an interesting city-building concept that forms the majority of what you will be working towards during your stay in the world. It’s interesting that even though you get a peek at these mechanics pretty early on, the flow of unlocking them really helps you understand the world before dumping too much at once.
“Graveyard Keeper 2 paces the unlocks with a lot more restraint and trust in the player.”
The quest tracker is something that, even though it was in the original, wasn’t something I thought they could retool in a very meaningful way, but I was wrong. In the first game, keeping track of what you were actually supposed to be doing next, across a dozen half-finished threads, felt like a chore. Here, the tracker breaks multi-step objectives into digestible chunks and gives you this almost timeline-like thread of tasks, so you’re never questioning what you should be doing next. It’s the kind of quality-of-life change that makes every other system feel more generous by comparison.
The big highlight here is the zombie combat built around reclaiming the city, and it works better than I expected going in. It really helps break up the gameplay loop and gives you something to work towards if farming isn’t really your thing. It never overstays its welcome either, with the combat sections being this timed push-the-line kind of idea where you fight zombie waves while capturing the flag to take the city back. What’s cool is being able to hire mercenaries, build blockades, and of course, suit up with better weapons and armour for yourself to have a better chance, because these sections aren’t exactly easy either.
None of this is to say the sequel is flawless. I frequently ran into some screen tearing and jittering every time I played; it’s most noticeable when you are moving through the map, and while it never made anything unplayable, it’s the kind of rough edge you notice and then can’t un-notice. More frustrating in practice were the progress bars on certain production stations, which would occasionally just vanish. I’d queue up a smelting job, walk away to do something else, and come back with no real sense of whether it had two minutes left or twenty. It’s unfortunate because it seemed to spread to other stations like woodcutting or even mining to the point where I really couldn’t see how long was left in a lot of things, so I would waste time trying to guess. Even a hard reset and quitting and reloading wouldn’t work.
Those issues aside, Graveyard Keeper 2 is a great sequel that understands what people actually liked about the original and, just as importantly, understands why people bounced off it. The dark comedy is still in full force; the tighter pacing, zombie city clearing, and even just the unlocked being better distributed mean it doesn’t reinvent what Graveyard Keeper is, but it refines it enough that it finally stands out as a great cozy sim.
Graveyard Keeper 2 isn’t a perfect game, but it’s a smart, confident sequel that fixes the exact things that held the first one back, and it does it without losing the weird, morbid charm that made people fall for this series in the first place. A few technical rough patches keep it from the very top tier, but this is easily one of the better sim sequels I’ve played this year, and I’d wager most players who bounced off the original will find a lot more to love this time around.
