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Graveyard Keeper 2 PS5 review – Stardew Valley with zombies

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2 hours ago

22 September 2026

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Graveyard Keeper 2 -it’s all part of the job (tinyBuild)

The latest indie cosy game mixes the tweeness of village life with a zombie plague that proves surprisingly helpful in running your grave-keeping business.

With their pixel art styling, focus on village life, and refusal to engage in anything as nerve jangling as combat, cosy games have enjoyed increasing popularity over the last decade. Perhaps it’s the parlous state of the world that’s created such a widely felt need to retreat from violence and threat, or maybe it’s just a matter of exploring the boundaries of what video games are capable of simulating.

Whatever it is, cosy games are everywhere, from Nintendo’s evergreen Animal Crossing to Strange Horticulture’s pleasantly occultist take on running a florist. The risk they continually run is crossing the line from comforting to twee, their sweetness mutating from authentic warmth to saccharine sentimentality. Luckily that’s not an issue 2018’s Graveyard Keeper had to contend with.

While it looked much like Stardew Valley, its amusingly morbid interest in autopsies and corpse disposal made it a fundamentally grittier proposition. Its sequel is similarly bereft of schmaltz, its anti-hero accompanied by his only friend and trusted advisor: Larry the cursed talking skull. You both inhabit an in-game base that once again combines morgue, graveyard, sepulchre, alchemy laboratory, and hovel with kitchenette.

Starting the game chained up in a dungeon, you’re soon freed, escaping through a town beset by zombie hordes, before finding yourself once again assigned to grave keeping duties. There you begin your progress through the game’s multiple tech trees, which slowly extend your crafting options, powered by all sorts of resource generators that increase in complexity as you progress through the game.

Presented in a top-down pixel art style that will be immediately familiar to fans of the first game – and Stardew Valley – the sequel retains most of the original’s systems and mechanics. Perhaps assuming prior knowledge, its tutorials are brief rather than comprehensive, which makes for a steep learning curve if you’re coming to this cold. It’s not insurmountable but it makes the opening hours more confusing than they need to be.

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That’s because there’s a great deal more to Graveyard Keeper 2 than mere corpse burial, which actually occupies a comparatively small proportion of your time. It is significant though, your surgical abilities tested by removing vital organs and tissue samples before bodies can be laid to rest, their graves decorated with a growing range of respectful fencing and memorials, each of which adds to your cemetery’s quality score.

You’ll also be gardening, your initially small plot dedicated both to cash crops and ingredients for your culinary creations. Preparing the soil, planting seeds, then coming back a day or two later to harvest grains and vegetables; waste foliage can be added to a compost heap that generates peat, which in the fullness of time will help you establish an orchard.

There’s a nearby town with colourful characters whose side quests you can help with, in a gradually expanding web of dependencies that drip feeds in new currencies and powers for your crafting and exploration. Your wooden anvil gives way to an iron one, as you upgrade your rusty starter tools for shiny new bronze ones, which are themselves soon supplanted by iron and steel replacements. It makes for long minutes spent holding down the action button as you craft the necessary combinations of ingredients.

Fortunately, those undead in town turn out to be good for more than just slaying, as you can also send small legions of them into battle rather than paying to hire mercenaries, and put them to work outside your morgue. Zombie stations let you automate crafting that had previously been manual, conveyer belts transporting and combining resources, your production facility changing from occasionally tedious time sink to a partially automated facility staffed by a cooperative cohort of the living dead.

Zombies make for tireless workers (tinyBuild)

Your keeper needs to take frequent breaks to sleep, recharging the energy needed for crafting, grave digging, and everything else. It’s also worth keeping an eye on the day/night cycle, and the game’s six-day week, which governs when certain characters and jobs will be available. For most of its playtime that’s the only real time pressure in Graveyard Keeper 2, which gives you the space to make up your own mind about priorities and which goals to pursue next.

The number and complexity of concurrent tasks you’re continually undertaking makes the game a test of working memory, with numerous distractions constantly threatening to derail your focus on whatever short and mid-term objectives you find yourself working on. It can also be quite a challenge remembering what combinations of resources you need to bring with you for a particular remote crafting project.

That issue’s eliminated when making stuff closer to home, where ingredients are automatically harvested from nearby chests, obviating the need to fiddle about, getting just the right number of items into your inventory. It’s a useful quality of life upgrade and frees you up to concentrate on more interesting problems.

There’s a huge amount to do, the script is appropriately offbeat, and the voice acting includes plenty of wonderful regional British accents, but despite those myriad touches and the over-arching upgrade process, Graveyard Keeper 2 never quite feels compelling enough. Whether it’s the continual sense of not quite knowing what you’re doing, or the lack of deadlines and sense of looming threat, the moment-to-moment gameplay keeps you busy, but fails to grip you in the way that many crafting-based games manage to.

It’s still a quirky and amusing twist on the genre and if you can get past the sense of bewilderment, as you navigate your way through its systems, there are many hours’ worth of crafting, unlocking, and pixel art cadaver embalming to be had in Graveyard Keeper 2. But it’s not hard to dig up half a dozen other cosy games that are significantly more compelling.

Graveyard Keeper 2 PS5 review summary

In Short: A complex and charmingly framed parallel to Stardew Valley, whose poorly explained but complicated mechanics, and lack of pressure, contrive to make it feel like less than the sum of its parts.

Pros: Multiple substantial tech trees lead to a vast spread of interdependent crafting options. The on-brand addition of zombie-based automation adds interest and its faux 16-bit looks are a joy throughout.

Cons: Takes a long time to understand many of its systems. There are some troublesome bugs and the absence of an overriding threat or deadline makes it less engrossing than it could be.

Score: 6/10

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £15.99
Publisher: tinyBuild
Developer: Lazy Bear Games
Release Date: 22nd September 2026
Age Rating: 16