Every time I see one of these pixelated, cozy, farming simulator games, it’s always a grandkid inheriting their grandparent’s timeworn farm within a town that’s going downhill, filled with folks and young adults waiting for me to woo and marry them. It becomes hard to tell these games apart because, while they’re different under the hood with different quirks, they end up looking very similar. 

Graveyard Keeper 2 is like that, but not like that at all. Much like the first game, Graveyard Keeper 2 has taken that “cozy” sim genre and brought it down to earth, six feet under the earth. You still grow crops and utilize the materials Mother Nature provides you, but this time, you are now also playing a necromancer simulator.

Graveyard Keeper 2 has many levels, great gameplay ideas, and a whimsical, comically voice-acted narrative (a huge surprise for this type of game); the question is, did Lazy Bear Games deliver a fun game?

A Man of Many Talents

As a cozy necromancer simulator, you take on the role of the amnesiac Keeper, a Grand Inquisitor with the ability to recycle the dead. As with any other game in this genre, you have humble beginnings, so you’ll need to strap in for the long grind. But that is why you play these games. For some reason, we find the in-game grind cozy. 

As the Keeper, you’ll need to grind for every single thing, and everything needs stamina, time, or both. You gather resources, take them to workbenches to turn them into processed materials, then you gather different types of processed materials to build into a finished product. This is typical of games in this genre. However, aside from working with wood, stone, wildlife, and crops, you’ll also be working with corpses, religion, research, alchemy, and autopsy. Each of these elements has many steps layered on top of it, requiring processed materials from different sources. “That’s cool! I can take the fat, skin, bones, and blood from this corpse and turn it into oil, paper, ink, and tools” was my initial thought, but there are many issues with this whole process.

Workbench Nightmare!

In Graveyard Keeper 2, you have your fingers in many pots, and each of those pots feels like it is miles away, requires a lot of attention and feels like the only solution is to be everywhere, everyone, all at once. And this is the ultimate goal; as the Grand Inquisitor, you’ll be able to use your undead as a resource to do all the tedious things you need to do. But getting there isn’t fun. 

The game has lots of travelling across town and between many screens. Typically, when a game tries to do a lot, it gives the player quality-of-life features to balance immersion and fun. Unfortunately, they forgot to include any of that, or they gatekeep it way too late in the game. 

Each main resource type has its own workbench. Wood, stone, clay- they’re outside your home. That’s one workbench. Your food, which includes a chopping block, oven, milling, etc., is inside your home. Don’t forget that cooking needs fire and water; those can be acquired by burning firewood that you’ve chopped outside. Cool, cool, that’s another workbench. Your crops beside your home to grow to sell or cook; that’s another workbench. 

Your graveyard keeper duties: that’s in the morgue; then you have to carry that body over to the cemetery. That’s two workbenches. Processing the things you’ve taken off of the corpses for your alchemy, that’s another workbench. Of course, by the cemetery is a church where you hold masses to garner faith from people (more on that later); that’s a workbench too! 

Also, Graveyard Keeper 2 is actually also a town-defence game where you use your undead to fight other undead; you definitely need another workbench for that. There are more; however, I’ve dedicated this much effort to talking about these workbenches because they’re either on different screens or far from each other. Worst of all, THEY DO NOT TALK TO EACH OTHER. 

Let me paint an early-game picture that you’ll encounter often in the game:

– You chop wood, haul the log over to process it.

– The donkey comes by to drop off a fresh corpse for you to bury. 

– Take the body over to the morgue and have it ready for burial.

– You do so, but it turns out you’re out of necessary decorations like crosses and borders for your grave (obviously it’s important to have a pretty cemetery, duh).

– If you thought you could use the building interface in the cemetery to build a woodworking bench to place near you since you’ll be making them often, you would be wrong. So you walk back to your processing area outside your home, make what you need, then walk right back to the cemetery. 

Building interfaces aren’t connected, and the chests are only connected by proximity. There’s no easy way to look at the recipes you have across all your professions, so if you need materials for a build on the other side of town, you better hope that you wrote it all down because you’ll need to carry them all with you. Not only does our Keeper walk slowly (though he’s been made faster from Graveyard Keeper 1, hooray), fast travel between areas is also limited and difficult to unlock due to it requiring a resource. 

Managing Resources

I’ve already established that managing regular resources and materials is less than fun; however, there are more resource types specific to your character growth. Apart from managing your forever dwindling stamina (and sanity), every action you perform will reward you with blue, green and red gems. You spend those gems to learn new skills from several Tech Trees, including building, metallurgy, farming, anatomy, alchemy and more. The character progression is perhaps my favourite part of Graveyard Keeper 2. There’s always something satisfying about seeing something come out with every swing of my axe, or grinding out a certain task so I can specifically improve my Keeper. 

The Tech Tree is quite expansive, allowing you to learn many things as you progress through the game. Starting with humble wood, all the way to steel with a zombie manufacturing assembling factory that’ll put Henry Ford to shame.

Performing certain actions a certain number of times will also unlock Inspirations within each of the trees. Acquiring enough inspirations will go towards acquiring perk points to spend on perks. Aaaand here is where they take on too much again and decide to make it a little less fun. You’ll quickly notice that performing certain actions isn’t enough; you’ll also need to acquire the Faith resource to claim the inspiration before you can earn a perk point.

This is where you’ll learn that schedules are really important in Graveyard Keeper 2. Once a week, you can hold a sermon if you have 10/10 town gratitude and earn faith and monetary donations. Since faith can only be obtained this way, it’s unfortunate that it’s used not only for inspirations but also for unlocking other quality-of-life features, specifically fast travel. 

Again, for a game that wants you to do so much, it gates too many conveniences behind resources and schedules. Now you have to worry about interacting with enough people to gain 10/10 town gratitude in time for a sermon once a week, on top of everything else you need to do.

Sermons aren’t the only things you need to schedule in either. Undead resurrection is another important one you need to pencil in to keep your assembly line and town defence running smoothly. 

Story, Graphics, and Sound

You’ll learn early on through the riveting storytelling abilities of Larry that Graveyard Keeper 2 is an isekai. For you non-anime nerds out there, this means he was summoned from another world. You progress through the narrative by following a conveniently placed Quest tab. As you do, Larry will learn more about the previous Grand Inquisitor, and he tells you about it using well-drawn illustrations and voice acting. The voice acting is serviceable, but having it at all is a refreshing boon in a game like this because it helps deliver the unhinged, comical atmosphere and dialogue. 

The game’s crisp, pixelated style suits the atmosphere well. One thing I focus on in world design is how easy it is to spot interactable items, and Lazy Bear Games does a great job communicating that to the player. This aspect of the game is a win. 

Do The Ends Justify The Means?

Once you put in the elbow grease doing everything yourself, you will be rewarded with fantastic automation, watching your zombies do all the arduous things you struggled through at the beginning. Defending your town and seeing all you’ve built improve the town, as well as uncovering the story and the relationships that the NPCs build, is fantastic. 

A game that’s trying to do too many things isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’ve played many “overwhelmingly” gameplay-rich games like this. However, in those games, they cut some gameplay aspects that help balance the grind and tedium with fun. I liked the idea of building my own undead army and using every little aspect of the living and the dead to profit off and rebuild the town. However, it is very, very difficult for me to recommend a game where the fun doesn’t pay off until 8 hours in. Especially when, even when you get to a point where you can outsource your work to the zombies, your role then becomes a necromancer undead human-resource manager.

While Graveyard Keeper 2 looks and sounds great, with increased gameplay elements and an improvement from the first iteration, it’s a game that leans too heavily on tedium where the in-game grind is no longer cozy; it’s just plain ol’ grind. 

Graveyard Keeper 2 was reviewed on PlayStation 5. We’d like to thank the publisher for a review code.