Home » League of Geeks » Graveyard Keeper is a game about medieval cemetary management

Graveyard Keeper is a game about medieval cemetary management

The developers of Punch Club are developing a game about unbridled capitalism in an unusual setting: spooky medieval graveyards. Here’s Graveyard Keeper.

Punch Club developers Lazy Bear Games are great at making management games. This much was known. But what they seem to particularly excel at is throwing management gameplay at the unlikeliest of concepts. While Punch Club brought management and strategy to a boxing setting that would have seemed more appropriate for an action game, Graveyard Keeper brings capitalist management to… medieval fantasy graveyards.

Right off the bat, there’s a lot of Stardew Valley to be seen in the game’s screenshots: it uses the same perspective and a very similarly lush 16-bit art style. Much like that agricultural game, you will also be working with the earth in this game, but understandably in a very, very different concept. Instead of a farm, you’ll be building your very own graveyard and populating it. There’s resource management, and you’ll expand your business into other avenues, such as witch burning. You can also make shrewd business deals, such as selling off blood you’ve… acquired… to the people who really need it.

This being a fantasy game, you can also reasonably expect spooky goings-on in the night. And somewhat obligatorily, there’s dungeons. You can find stuff in them, though I wouldn’t expect your character to get decked out in platinum armour.

The game’s announcement was accompanied by a trailer. While it doesn’t show any gameplay as such, it did make me laugh out loud, which I was not expecting. Have a look.

Graveyard Keeper is slated to release sometime in summer this year on PC, Mac, Linux and Xbox One. If you’re attending PAX East in Boston this March, you can play the game’s public demo at tinyBuild’s orangey booth. You can also sign up for the game’s alpha over at the official website.