Graveyard Keeper is Stardew Valley with corpses - you manage a cemetery, improve dead bodies, and deal with hilariously dark NPCs. It's charming and unique but can get grindy. The Breaking Dead DLC is essential (adds zombie automation), other DLCs are hit-and-miss. Worth playing if you want something different from the farming sim formula.
Summary
Graveyard Keeper takes the cozy farming sim formula and gives it a delightfully macabre twist. You're a guy who gets hit by a car, wakes up in a medieval fantasy world, and suddenly you're running a cemetery and church. It's Stardew Valley meets The Addams Family, and honestly? It mostly works. While it has some rough edges and can get grindy, there's something weirdly relaxing about tending graves and managing corpse quality.
What Makes This Game Tick
The core loop is familiar if you've played any farming sim - gather resources, craft items, complete quests, upgrade your equipment. But instead of tending crops, you're managing a graveyard. Instead of selling vegetables, you're improving corpse quality and optimizing burial efficiency. It sounds grim, but the game's dark humor keeps things light.
The technology tree system is pretty clever - you need three different types of experience points (Red, Blue, Green) to unlock new crafting recipes and abilities. Red comes from combat and corpse work, Blue from study and research, Green from nature and farming. This creates some interesting decision-making about how to spend your time.
clever implementation for the tech tree.
What really got me hooked was the corpse quality management. You can actually improve bodies before burying them - removing organs, adding better parts, even cosmetic improvements. It's morbid as hell but strangely satisfying when you create the "perfect" corpse that gives maximum graveyard rating.
The Good Stuff
The art style is gorgeous - pixelated but detailed, with a perfect balance of cute and creepy. The writing is genuinely funny too. NPCs have personality, and the dialogue often had me chuckling. There's something refreshing about a game that doesn't take itself too seriously while dealing with death.
I really like this pixelated art !
The variety of activities keeps things interesting. Beyond graveyard management, you've got farming, fishing, dungeon crawling, smithing, and even tavern management (with DLC). Each system feels meaningful and ties into the others nicely.
You'll never be sitting around wondering what to do next - there's always something on your plate, which is honestly a good thing.
Just look at this graph !
The DLC Breakdown - Hit or Miss Content
Graveyard Keeper has four major expansions, and honestly, they're a mixed bag. Some are essential, others feel like padding.
Breaking Dead (2018) - The MVP
This is hands down the best DLC and frankly should have been in the base game. You get a resurrection table that lets you create zombies to automate basically everything - gathering resources, crafting, farming, even running your shop.
Just a healthy 24/7 work schedule !
The automation is a game-changer. Instead of spending hours manually chopping wood or crafting items, your zombie army does it while you focus on the fun parts. Different quality zombies have different capabilities, so there's still strategy involved. This DLC single-handedly fixes the game's biggest grind problem.
Verdict: Essential. Get this immediately.
Stranger Sins (2019) - Solid Addition
This one adds tavern management and fleshes out the previously silent NPCs with actual personalities and questlines. The tavern mechanics are pretty engaging - you're producing and selling food/drinks, managing reputation, and dealing with special events.
pretty enjoyable tavern management system
The character development is welcome. NPCs who were just quest dispensers now have actual stories and personalities. It also adds a new ending to the main game, which gives you more reason to replay.
Verdict: Good content, worth it if you're invested in the world.
Game of Crone (2020) - Hit and Miss
This expansion adds a refugee camp and vampire mystery storyline. The refugee management is interesting enough, and there's some genuinely funny content (the donkey's communist revolution subplot is absurd and hilarious).
But it feels a bit disconnected from the core game. The vampire investigation is fine but not particularly compelling, and the refugee mechanics don't integrate as smoothly as the tavern from Stranger Sins.
Verdict: Decent but skippable unless you've exhausted everything else.
Better Save Soul (2021) - The Weakest Link
This DLC focuses on investigating sins of corpses and the living with new characters Euric and Smiler. You can remove sins to improve corpse quality and add remote control to crafting stations.
Honestly, this feels like content for content's sake. The sin investigation mechanic is tedious, the new characters aren't particularly interesting, and while remote crafting control is nice, it's not enough to carry the whole expansion.
Verdict: Skip it unless you're a completionist.
DLC Recommendation
If you're getting into Graveyard Keeper, definitely get Breaking Dead - it's essential. Stranger Sins is solid if you want more content. The other two are only worth it if you're completely hooked and need more stuff to do, or just wait for a Bundle sale.
Where It Gets Frustrating
Let's be honest - this game can be grindy as hell. Some quests require massive amounts of resources that take forever to gather. The pacing feels off sometimes, with long stretches where you're just waiting for resources to generate or for specific days to trigger events.
The quest system can be confusing. NPCs are only available on certain days, some quests have unclear requirements, and progression sometimes feels needlessly obtuse. I spent way too much time wandering around trying to figure out what to do next.
Resource management gets tedious. Your inventory space is limited, storage is scattered, and moving stuff around becomes a chore. Coming from games like Stardew Valley, the UI feels clunky.
