Graveyard Keeper 2: run the graveyard, then take back the Town

This page is the reference sheet for the game: what it is, what changed from the original, how the Town, the combat and the zombie workforce fit together, where you can play it and what it asks of your PC. It is written for someone deciding whether to pick it up now that it is out. Everything on it comes from the Steam store page, the developer’s own devlogs on Steam and tinyBuild’s press releases.

A management sim with a dark sense of humour and a very long to-do list. Steam files it under adventure, RPG and simulation. Its own pitch calls it “the most inaccurate medieval cemetery sim”, the sequel to “the original, unhinged classic”, and promises that you will lead your undead army into battle to save the realm from a zombie apocalypse and turn the zombie problem into a thriving business. You are the Keeper again, now the Grand Inquisitor, with a house, a church and a graveyard handed to you and, next door, the Town the first game never let you into.

The loop keeps the original’s shape. You manage your own medieval graveyard, bury the dead, harvest flora, fauna and human remains, craft, research the Tech Tree and, in the developer’s words, turn the dead into pure profit. What sits on top of it is new: a Town to reclaim district by district, a combat layer with towers and barricades, and a production chain run by zombies. tinyBuild’s feature list still names fishing, trading and character customisation alongside all of that.

Graveyard Keeper 2 is single-player. Steam lists it as single-player only, with full controller support and Steam Cloud saves.

The developer’s launch post on Steam sums up the job in a few orders: rebuild, fortify and defend the Town, automate production, lead an undead army, and keep the graveyard looking good.

Lazy Bear says it wanted to keep everything people loved about the original, and a few things they hated, while bringing something fresh and opening up a much larger part of the world. The changes that matter most, from the developer’s own devlogs:

The Town is the headline. When you arrive it is nearly abandoned, and most of it has been overrun by townsfolk who turned into zombies. You take it back district by district, and after each area is cleared you decide what to rebuild: housing, cafés, shops, local infrastructure. You complete quests throughout the city for the townsfolk while, as Steam puts it, your undead workers take care of the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Several buildings are on offer at any time, and the choice matters, because buildings create new markets for your goods and unlock products and resources you can buy.

The graveyard still sits outside the walls, near your base. The Town feeds it. The larger and more prosperous the Town gets, the more bodies arrive and the better they are, which is the sort of economic logic the series has always enjoyed. Through the Tech Tree you unlock graveyard modules that hold tombs, benches, columbaria, monuments and graves, plus a wider range of grave designs and decorations.

Beyond the Town there is more map than before: the southern outskirts, with another village, another tavern, another forest, swamp, church and graveyard.

Town battles run on a weekly rhythm, like much of the Keeper’s life: they are only available on one day of the week. If you want to fight on other days, the sewers are open six days out of six and full of zombies.

Town battles happen on the streets themselves rather than in arenas, and different districts play differently. The Town Square has you holding off waves from every direction. The central streets have you pushing on several fronts and capturing control points.

Preparation is where the rest of the game comes in:

The developers expect you to find your own style: all-archer squads, spiked barricades that do the work, or a stack of combat potions. Over the whole game you will put a little over 4,000 zombies to rest. On mouse and keyboard, combat is designed to be played with one hand.

Zombies first showed up in a DLC for the original game as helpers. In the sequel they are the backbone of production. They operate semi-automatic machines in underground factories, each zombie has its own skill progression, and specialised roles need specialised workers.

The twist is corruption. In the first game you chased white skulls. Here, the more corrupted a zombie is, marked by red skulls, the better the skills it can develop. Sinners make the most corrupted zombies, and a comfortable, well-supplied Town produces more sinners. You can also combine the most corrupted parts from different corpses and add corruption embalming.

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Screenshots via the game’s Steam store page · © their respective rights holders.

Graveyard Keeper 2 has been out since 22 September 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, according to tinyBuild’s launch announcement. On PC the Steam version is Windows only. When the game was revealed in April, tinyBuild also named the Epic Games Store and GOG as PC stores.

On Steam it costs $24.99, with no launch discount. Pre-orders came with two bonuses: a sauna outside your house and an outfit that depends on the platform you bought on. If the pre-order content did not show up in an existing save, a hotfix on launch day fixed exactly that. On 23 September, the day after launch, Steam user reviews stood at Very Positive; on 24 September the developer put them at 84 per cent positive. Two patches followed in the first week, 1.005 and 1.006.

Text is available in eleven languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Turkish. Only English has full audio.

A free demo went live on 14 September 2026 on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch 2. Since launch, Steam no longer lists it. It ran around three to four hours, from your first steps up to the introduction of the Town, and the demo announcement adds a first visit to the Town and a first go at leading an army to protect it. Your demo save carries over into the full game.

The game needs about 4 GB of storage and DirectX 12.