Graveyard Keeper Game Review

Management sims have always had a loyal fanbase. Whether you’re into building cities, running zoos, managing hospitals, or coaching sports teams, there’s no shortage of games that let you take the reins. And with farming sims making a huge comeback (just whisper “Stardew Valley” three times and you’ll summon a fan), it’s no surprise that something like Graveyard Keeper caught my attention. I didn’t even know I wanted a graveyard management sim until this game showed up. It has that retro-RPG Maker vibe but throws in a weirdly fascinating concept: you’re in charge of a cemetery. Yep, managing graves is the whole deal.

What makes it stand out is its quirky tone. Despite the morbid subject matter—handling corpses and all—Graveyard Keeper isn’t dreary or depressing. It leans into dark humor asking you to roll with the bizarre idea of turning death into your next entrepreneurial venture. Here? You can literally turn corpses into lunchmeat.

But before you can go full Frankenstein, you have to do a bunch of other stuff first. The story kicks off with your character getting hit by a car and waking up in a medieval world where a talking skull informs you, you’re now the local graveyard manager. Your main goal is to get home, but mostly, you just… go with it. A donkey drops a corpse at your door. The bishop tells you to clean up the graveyard. So, you get to work—or at least try to.

The game tells you the basics: how to dig graves, dissect bodies, and sell burial certificates for cash. But after that, it goes completely silent. I spent five hours just figuring out the core gameplay because while it told me what to do, it never explained how. Your first big task is to improve the graveyard’s rating by tidying things up. That means building better gravestones and burying bodies in decent condition. Hit a certain rating, and you can reopen the church. Why? Just because someone said so.

Normally, I wouldn’t question a management game’s logic, but Graveyard Keeper gave me pause. There’s something oddly casual about how it treats the whole “harvesting organs and dumping bodies in the river” thing.  It’s like the game can’t decide if it wants to respect the dead or treat them like spare parts.

Graveyard Grind: Managing the Dead, One Corpse at a Time

Speaking of spare parts, gathering materials is a whole thing. You have to unlock technologies—basically knowledge points—and build all sorts of workbenches to get anything done. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s a bit Stardew Valley-Esque. There are red, green, and blue points: red for manual labor, green for farming, and blue for anything “brainy,” like burials. The catch? Some techs show up in the menu early on, others only appear once someone mentions them. So, you’re often wandering around hoping someone drops a hint.

Outside the graveyard, you can grow crops, cook, and take on side quests. But here’s where the game starts to stumble. Nothing feels intuitive. NPCs give you vague instructions, and if you forget something, tough luck—it won’t be repeated. One guy asked me for vegetables. By the time I had them, I couldn’t remember when he came back to town. I had to look it up. Another time, I asked how to make paper and got something like, “You can make it or buy it, I guess.”

I can’t tell if the clunky quest system is intentional or just a bit of a mess. Maybe both. I’m all for games that don’t hold your hand, but when you need a wiki just to get through the basics, that’s a red flag. And it’s frustrating because once you get the hang of it, there’s fun to be had—just not for everyone.

There are also smaller annoyances. The in-game days fly by way too fast. Sometimes your energy bar still has juice, but the day’s already over. You can work at any hour, sure, but while machines show how much energy a task uses, the energy bar itself is kind of a mystery. You end up guessing how much stuff will actually drain you.

The world is big and nicely designed, but honestly, it could be half the size. There’s just not much to see. (A teleport stone helps now, thankfully.) It might sound like I’m nitpicking, but all these small issues pile up, especially when they seem kind of unnecessary.

And the quests? They’re long. Really long. I haven’t finished a single one in under three hours, and I’ve tried. Sometimes that’s because the NPC only shows up once a week, but mostly it’s because you have to grind out techs and build a mini factory before you can even start.

If there were some senses of accomplishment along the way, it might feel worthwhile. But more often than not, you’re just waiting for something—points, people, progress.

Digging Up the Verdict

It’s clear that Graveyard Keeper was made with a lot of care. You can use pretty much every little item in some way, and that’s cool. But it’s also wildly unbalanced. I spent nearly ten hours before I remembered, “Oh right, I’m supposed to be managing a graveyard.”

Compared to Stardew Valley, it really highlights what’s missing: the warmth, the satisfying daily rhythm, and most of all, the freedom. Graveyard Keeper doesn’t hold your hand, sure—but it never fully let’s go either. Everything you want to do is tied to something else you have to do first. After 30 hours with it, that’s what I remember most: always waiting for something.

If you like this review and want to see more, you can click here.  My snapchat is Cara_lynn97. Twitter and Instagram are the same. I stream on twitch multiple days a week! Be sure to follow me to see the live playthroughs of games and anything else I might do and post online.