There is a pretty good chance that you have played Graveyard Keeper, and you may have even played it for the same reason I did: it was free on Steam back in April.
I tend to be a little more forgiving of games I don’t have to pay for, but even with that in mind, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Graveyard Keeper wears its Stardew Valley inspirations on its sleeve. It’s a slightly grindy resource management sim with a macabre twist and cute, homely pixel art. A simple game to lose 50 or so hours in.
Is that solid enough of a bedrock to warrant a sequel? Well, that question already has an answer, as developer Lazy Bear Games’ Graveyard Keeper 2 was released just over a week ago on September 22. I’ve sunk about 20 hours into the sequel so far, and I don’t think it’s reductive of me to say that this is essentially the same game with a new coat of paint.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, there are some nifty quality-of-life improvements in the sequel, making Graveyard Keeper 2 feel a lot less grindy and a bit more forgiving in the inventory management department. The pixel art certainly does look crisper too, and all the dialogue is now fully voiced if that tickles your fancy.
Graveyard Keeper 2 is good for the same reason that Graveyard Keeper is. Unfortunately, there is one addition to the sequel that nullifies my enjoyment of its QoL improvements: the story.
The issue here is that the cadence of Graveyard Keeper 2’s management-sim aspects feels out of tune with its story beats. I’m the type of sicko who enjoys the classic resource-management loop: find a resource, use that resource to build a workbench, use that workbench to turn a different resource into a new resource, use that new resource to build a new tool—and so on. I cut my teeth on the Harvest Moon games as a kid, so this sort of thing is very much in my wheelhouse.
In this sense, the only aspect of Graveyard Keeper 2 that’s truly new is the plot. The first game contained a story of sorts, but it was background noise. However, in Graveyard Keeper 2—look, there’s no way to sugarcoat this: the NPCs just will not shut the fuck up.
You walk into town; the guards lock you into a cutscene to spout a load of rubbish about the weather. You go to hand in a quest; oh, actually, here’s twenty paragraphs about why you have to hand that quest to a different NPC. You try to go to sleep; Larry, the talking skull that sits at your bedside, decides this is a great time to lore-dump on you. You manage to actually go to sleep; some asshole decides to interrupt the fade-to-black to give you a new quest.
This is what I’m referring to when I say it all feels off-beat. The humor in the first game did not tickle my fancy, but it was a minor, brief annoyance between long stretches of gameplay. In Graveyard Keeper 2, it’s relentless. I just wanna sell my crap to the innkeeper, man. I do not want to spam through Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace before I can get to the bloody trade prompt.
It’s a small, constant frustration that slowly accumulates into an outright vexation—one that would ultimately be a complete non-issue if the writing had improved since the first Graveyard Keeper. But no; the jokes are still bad, the NPCs are still one-dimensional, and I’ve still been offered no reason to engage with the narrative in any meaningful way. The only difference is that now there’s a lot more crappy dialogue to parse, and some poor voice actors had to do their best to sell it all.
Nobody came away from Graveyard Keeper thinking, “Gee, the management sim aspects were fun, but the story was my favorite part,” so I’m not sure why the devs doubled down on this aspect of the game for the sequel if they didn’t have something substantial to offer. The sheer volume of dialogue just detracts from an otherwise slightly improved experience, but I genuinely think the trade-off is a net negative.
And the worst part is that progressing a lot of the management-sim aspects of Graveyard Keeper 2 is directly tied to enduring NPCs’ dialogue and completing their quests. This constant, forced stopping and starting—having to compel myself through cutscenes when I just wanna plant my goddamn crops—makes me wish the devs had taken a lot more inspiration from Stardew Valley in terms of maintaining a good flow.
If you aren’t interested in interfacing with Stardew Valley’s cast of characters, you can just avoid giving them gifts. If you don’t wanna get locked into a story cutscene, Stardew Valley gives you a heads-up: hey man, there’s a long-ass event in the town square tomorrow, so maybe don’t go there if you don’t want to spend half an hour making a big soup with 40 different NPCs.
Instead, Graveyard Keeper 2’s narrative-related pestering just made me wish I was playing the first game instead. It’s not a dealbreaker, and it might sound like an overblown gripe when you can just brute-force your way through it all by constantly hammering a single button, but when there’s so little new content on offer, it does make me question the point of Graveyard Keeper 2’s existence. Why should I bother investing $25 in the sequel when it feels inferior overall to the version I was given for free mere months ago?
