Graveyard Keeper

If Stardew Valley got hit by a truck, woke up in a graveyard, and decided to monetize human remains, you’d get Graveyard Keeper. Equal parts charming, convoluted, and corpse-stuffed, this medieval cemetery sim asks the age-old question: “Why buy meat for the witch-burning festival when you already have a fresh body in the morgue?”

Your new gig as the titular Keeper starts with death and never lets up. The graveyard’s a mess, there’s a talking skull demanding wine, and a communist donkey drops off cadavers with the reliability of Amazon Prime. Every corpse has stats, and managing them is a balancing act between grave quality and, uh, meat profitability. It’s weird. It’s a lot. It’s kinda brilliant.

Beyond digging holes and crafting headstones, you’ll juggle dozens of systems: tech trees, alchemy, farming, dungeon crawling, church building, and more, all layered over a time-based sim that punishes poor planning with missed events and rotting corpses. Energy’s limited, so you’ll need to nap, snack, or suffer. Often all three.

But Graveyard Keeper doesn’t hold your hand, it doesn’t even tell you where the hand is. You’ll spend more time on the wiki than in confession, and unlocking blue tech points sometimes feels like trying to study quantum physics with a shovel. That said, once the systems click, it’s deeply satisfying in the same way cleaning your room is: tedious at first, but addictive once the feng shui hits.

Verdict? Graveyard Keeper is a devilishly deep, darkly funny sim that thrives on chaos and corpse-based commerce. Just don’t expect to understand anything without a browser tab open.