Lazy Bear Games' second Graveyard Keeper is an improvement on the first title in absolutely all aspects, from charming full voiceover to better automation. The RPG mechanics and ongoing progress through better crafting stay the main attraction.
Aside from a few experiments, the path taken by Lazy Bear Games—a Russian studio that relocated to Lithuania—has been a straightforward one. From the very beginning, the indie studio has found its greatest success with its charming, sometimes deeply sarcastic, but always strongly progression-focused management RPGs. Its debut title, Punch Club (2016), was followed by Graveyard Keeper in 2018. What both games had in common was that their progression was expressed through explicit RPG mechanics: higher stats enabled more actions, those actions improved the stats, and so on. Swag and Sorcery (2019) was followed by Punch Club 2: Fast Forward (2023), and in 2024, Lazy Bear received the League of Legends license from Riot Games as part of the now-discontinued Riot Forge program. Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story was strongly reminiscent of Graveyard Keeper due to its crafting RPG format.
Following a co-development phase on Bloomtown: A Different Story with Different Sense Games—literally a different story for Lazy Bear, moving away from crafting and drawing much more heavily on JRPG formulas like Persona and Shin Megami Tensei—Graveyard Keeper 2 was released on September 22, 2026, marking what is arguably Lazy Bear Games’ biggest game to date.
The “2” in the title is quite clear in this case: Graveyard Keeper 2 is not only a direct sequel to Graveyard Keeper in terms of the story; it is also an improved version of the first game in every respect. All the mechanics return, and established gameplay elements remain unchanged: The eponymous Keeper awakens with no memory, becomes the ruler of a dilapidated Inquisitor base complete with a cemetery, and from then on builds and hammers his way through classic crafting progression—from wood and bronze, through reinforced beams and iron, all the way to marble, machine parts, and steel. At the same time, he must tend to the villagers’ spiritual well-being: in weekly ceremonies, he gathers faith, which is another crafting ingredient; the deceased can be prepared to yield the finest possible graves, or butchered for their alchemically valuable internal organs. Sometimes one thing leads to another, as embalming can also be learned. And finally, crafting processes can be partially automated by turning particularly suitable corpses into zombies. This is also a central focus of the game’s story, as a zombie plague sweeps across the land following the Keeper’s actions in the first Graveyard Keeper.
A new addition is a combat minigame, which isn’t really a challenge in itself—it’s just another excuse for more crafting: If you prepare the best gear in advance, carry good weapons, and build solid barricades, you won’t have any trouble here. Winning battles unlocks new areas of the map and additional rewards. This is where Graveyard Keeper 2 really shines, as all of the game’s reward systems are interconnected. Sometimes you need a special tool to unlock a new building material, and that tool is located in a zombie-infested area. Other times, you need a specific agricultural product to appease a merchant, who in turn sells new seeds that can be used to establish a new line of crops, such as wine production.
Finally, around the middle of the game, Graveyard Keeper 2 reveals its biggest innovation—one that’s only briefly hinted at in the game’s prologue and then left untapped: Hidden in the basement of the Inquisition base is a fully automated factory, which, however, must be built entirely from scratch and powered by zombies. It doesn’t quite match the complexity of Factorio or Satisfactory, but players who aren’t at all interested in the automation genre might be put off by this—especially since manually setting up the zombie workshops, which then run automatically, requires quite a bit of tedious work.
Graveyard Keeper 2 released 22 September 2022 on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch and Switch 2.
Graveyard Keeper 2 is a true sequel: bigger, more polished, better, and featuring some quality additions, such as full voice acting. There’s no longer any reason to play the first Graveyard Keeper, because the second installment does everything better!
