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Graveyard Keeper 2 is out, and the cemetery is only the start of the business
The Keeper has somehow been promoted to Grand Inquisitor, which turns out to involve considerably more work than maintaining a suspiciously profitable cemetery. Graveyard Keeper 2 launched on September 22, bringing back the original game's automation and dark comedy while adding a ruined town to rebuild and a zombie invasion that cannot simply be put on the payroll.
By Kader Graveyard Keeper 2 
The graveyard still pays the bills
The sequel keeps its predecessor's basic management logic. Players gather plants, materials and human remains, construct machinery and gradually automate production around a medieval graveyard. Zombies remain extremely convenient workers: they do not need days off, and the game is quite happy to turn that labor advantage into a business model.
The difference is where all that production now leads. The Town needs to be restored, its residents have problems to solve, and homes and businesses can be brought back into operation. Zombie-powered automation handles part of the background work while the player expands the wider settlement.
The other zombies are considerably less cooperative
Graveyard Keeper 2 also gives the Grand Inquisitor an army. A zombie apocalypse threatens the kingdom, so players build fortifications and towers, craft weapons and armor, train undead troops and personally lead them into battle.
Lazy Bear Games said in its pre-release combat breakdown that players would put a little over 4,000 hostile zombies to rest over the course of the game. Mouse-and-keyboard combat was also designed to be playable one-handed, an oddly appropriate convenience for a management game that already asks the other half of your brain to think about production lines.
Combat therefore has a practical relationship with the management layer rather than existing as a detached minigame. Equipment needs to be produced, defenses need resources and troops need preparation. The apocalypse becomes another demand placed on the same increasingly automated economy.
The demo save comes with you
Players who started with the free Steam demo do not need to treat those opening hours as disposable. The demo, released on September 14, covers roughly three to four hours according to its official store description and runs from the beginning of the game through the introduction of The Town.
Its save data is designed to carry into the full release. The developers reiterated that feature on launch day and later provided PC troubleshooting instructions for cases where the transfer does not happen automatically.
A larger machine built around the same bad ethics
Steam lists Graveyard Keeper 2 at a regular US price of $24.99, with Lazy Bear Games as developer and tinyBuild as publisher. The game retains the Adventure, RPG and Simulation classification of its management-heavy predecessor while pushing the scale beyond one cemetery.
That expansion is probably the clearest way to read the sequel's design. Graveyard management, automated production, town restoration and combat all feed into one deliberately cynical system. The first game already found questionable ways to make the dead productive. Graveyard Keeper 2 simply introduces thousands more zombies and asks which ones should be employees and which ones need to be hit with a sword.