Graveyard Keeper 2 is out now, and the undead do the work
Lazy Bear Games has put Graveyard Keeper 2 on sale for £22.49 on PC, with PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch versions standing alongside it.
Graveyard Keeper 2 is out now. Lazy Bear Games released the sequel today, 22 September, and tinyBuild is publishing it: the Steam build went live at £22.49, with PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch versions named by the publisher in its own launch video. The first Graveyard Keeper arrived in 2018 and asked players to run a medieval cemetery; the sequel widens the job from keeping graves tidy to running the town around them.
What the sequel asks you to do
The pitch from the developer is a management sim with an unusually grubby supply chain. Players rebuild and fortify The Town, automate production lines, restore homes and businesses, solve the townsfolk’s problems and turn the local zombie problem into labour. Combat is in, according to the studio’s own combat preview, and the undead are the staff rather than the threat.
Anyone who played the demo can carry that save into the full game, and pre-order bonuses are already in the accounts of players who bought early. That continuity matters more than it sounds: the first game’s long opening is the part players most often bounce off, and a sequel that lets a demo save survive into launch is deliberately removing that barrier.
Where you can play it, and on what
On PC the launch build is single-player, carries Steam Achievements and full controller support including DualSense and DualShock pads, and runs on Windows. Steam lists English full audio with menus and subtitles in French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Turkish. Console pricing is not published in the developer’s launch post, so the £22.49 figure should be read as the Steam price rather than a worldwide one.
What Lazy Bear says about it
The developer’s own launch post is refreshingly short on marketing language: “Graveyard Keeper 2 is out now! Rebuild, fortify, and defend The Town. Automate production. Lead an undead army — and for the love of Sard, keep that Graveyard looking good!” The same post points players at the official Steam Discussions and the studio’s Discord for bug reports, which is the honest place for a launch-day build’s rough edges to surface.
Our opinion
A sequel to a game whose whole joke was the indignity of corpse-hauling has one obvious trap, and it is scale. The first Graveyard Keeper worked because the work was small and absurd: you dug a grave, you filed a sermon, you wondered why the donkey was late. Graveyard Keeper 2 adds production automation, town reconstruction and an undead army, and every one of those systems is a way for the game to stop being about a man with a shovel. Lazy Bear has earned the benefit of the doubt after Punch Club and the original, but more systems is not automatically more humour, and the studio’s own combat preview reads like the part of the design it is least sure about.
The pricing is the quietly radical bit. £22.49 for a full sequel in 2026, with demo saves carried forward and no pre-order gate on content, is a direct bet that people will pay a fair price for a finished thing rather than a discounted price for a live-service promise. If the launch build is as complete as the demo suggested, that is the healthiest commercial signal a small studio can send, and it deserves to be copied more often than the seasonal battle pass it replaces.