Cemetaries are a place that evoke both solemn feelings as a place of remembrance, and eerie vibes as a place associated with death. Their imagery often appears around Halloween time, or in horror media. But thanks to Graveyard Keeper, they've also joined farms as the center of a cozy management sim. They've done so once again with the new sequel, Graveyard Keeper 2, which I was excited to get the opportunity to try out, and now that I've played it, I'd like to share my thoughts on it.
Story
The story of Graveyard Keeper 2 is set after the events of the first game. When the Keeper died and was brought to this world, it's revealed that he was actually split into two separate beings. One was the first game's protagonist, and the actions of the player in the first game led to a zombie apocalypse that the second copy of the Keeper was blamed for. As a result, he had been locked in a dungeon by the Inquisition for years, only to be freed by a fairy that tasks him with saving the world doomed by his counterpart. We take on his role and become both a new Graveyard Keeper and a part-time Inquisitor.
Visuals and Music
The game is visually just about the same as the original, and has a very similar score as well. The audio is nothing to write home about, but also nothing I'd label as bad; it gets the job done without being overly intrusive. The graphical style is a top-down 2D style with plenty of nice effects that add some liveliness to the world, including dynamic lighting and shadows that shift with the time of day and position of light sources, plants that sway in the wind (or in some cases, as you walk through them), and plenty of other nice touches. It all adds up to create a 2D game that still feels as though there's depth to the environment.
Gameplay
Now for the real meat (don't ask where we got it) and potatoes of the game. Above all else Graveyard Keeper 2 is a management sim. Your primary job is of course keeping the graveyard, but that's far from the only thing you'll do. You also need to save the world, whether that's helping out the people of the village and town, holding sermons at the temple to keep them faithful, fighting off the hordes of zombies that have taken over most of the town, and much more. I'll split this into a few sections, and will only go over each briefly since there's far too much to cover otherwise.
Crafting and Gathering
As with any game that has you managing something, you need a lot of materials and have a lot of things to make with those materials. You may be making grave markers for the deceased in your cemetary, cooking food to keep your stamina up (with ingredients from farming and fishing), creating armor and weapons to fight off zombies with, and plenty more. You'll often need a certain skill level with each kind of labor in order to gather or craft certain relevant things, which can be effected by both tools you craft yourself, and through perks, which I'll talk about more in a bit. Your crafting stations are usually placeable on specific areas of your base, so it's quite likely that yours will look a bit different from how mine does.
The Graveyard
As the title suggests, one of your primary duties is taking care of the town's cemetary. This will include digging the graves, preparing the bodies, burying them, and adding things like markers and frames to keep the graves looking nice. Bodies will have skull levels to them, a red level and a white one, which cancel one another out and create a total level (so a corpse with 3 white skulls and two red skulls essentially has a 1 white skull level). You can remove certain body parts from the corpse, whether to use as resources, or to adjust the skull levels, and later on can add things for the same purpose. If a body is to be buried, it's best to aim for a high white skull level (red skulls serve a purpose I'll mention later). When you add markers or decorations to a grave, it adds wreaths, and every white skull accompanied by a wreath adds a level to the overall graveyard condition (while trees, rocks, and holes without a buried corpse subtract levels).
Farming and Fishing
Getting ingredients for cooking is relatively simple. You can plant seeds on a plot of land on your base, which after a while will grow into a harvestable plant. These can be sold to the village shop or used for cooking. Fishing is similarly simple, you use your fishing rod at a spot with the right kind of bait for the fish there, complete a simple mini-game, and have a fish you can sell or fillet for food.
Quests
The quests are the primary means of progressing through the game. As you go about the town you'll encounter a handful of characters who likely have some means of helping you learn to do something new, or getting you access to additional areas. They'll usually either require certain items from you, or may need you to complete a task, whether that be fighting off some zombies, gaining goodwill with townsfolk, or something else entirely. Many of these quests come together over time and make up the bulk of the game's story.
Combat
The world is in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, and while this game is primarily a management and crafting game, at times you will need to take up arms and fight off the horde to liberate parts of the town. The combat itself is fairly simple, you'll fight with either a sword or bow, and will have squads of other fighters to command. The battles are a checkpoint capturing sort of deal, where you need to capture various zones in the area and hold them all to the end. You can place the squads fighting with you by moving their flags, and capture enemy checkpoints by defeating any enemies within them and remaining there for a while. If at the end of the time you hold all of them, you'll win the battle and usually unlock a new part of the town. You can build barricades, archer towers, and other defensive measures before a battle to keep your own checkpoints safe as well.
Character Progression
As you progress through the game, the capabilities of the Keeper will need to progress as well. You get tech points every time you do just about anything in the game, which you can spend to learn how to craft or build new things (though some parts of the tech tree are locked behind quest progression as well), and you can perform various tasks to unlock perks that may improve your ability to perform certain tasks, or increase your skill levels, which at higher levels make certain tasks possible at all and lower level ones easier. You can also increase your skills by equipping a better corresponding tool.
Automation
The last thing I want to mention is the game's automation system. Returning from the first game's Breaking Dead DLC are friendly zombies you can have perform certain tasks for you, like crafting and gathering. Each can be equipped with one tool, and they will also gain tech points from performing tasks (though their points are instead used to unlock perks for that zombie). There is a limit to how many perks each zombie can have, and that limit is determined by the red skull level of the corpse the zombie was resurrected from. They can be quite useful and almost essential later on when you start needing to produce bigger and bigger amounts of materials that would be unwieldy to make on your own.
A new addition to the automation is machines and conveyer belts, which let you set up full assembly lines for your zombies to work on, allowing more automatic and complicated tasks. I am a big fan of automation games like Satisfactory so I was definitely a big fan of a more in depth automation system centered around assembly lines appearing here. I don't want to give away too much on how they work since this is probably the biggest change from the first game and I want people to have the opportunity to experience it themselves, but I can say for certain that they enhanced my experience.
Conclusion
I've really only scratched the surface here, as there's several kinds of crafting and materials I haven't discussed too much, plenty of options with the conveyers you can build, and plenty more to the story, but I wanted to give anyone interested a chance to encounter things on their own, so I'll wrap this up here. I had an absolutely fantastic time with this game, and think it's exactly what I think a sequel should be. It's got everything that made the first Graveyard Keeper great, both in terms of the vibe and the gameplay, while improving on that formula and adding some new things onto it.
Whether you're a fan of the first one, like management games, or just want something that's both cozy and has a healthy dose of spooky silliness, absolutely pick up Graveyard Keeper 2, it did not disappoint in the slightest.
VERDICT: Recommended
Reviewed on PC
Review Copy was Provided
Available On: Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC
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