Graveyard Keeper - Game of Crone

I have a complicated relationship with games that dare to call themselves 'the most inaccurate medieval cemetery sim of the year' - because that kind of self-aware humor either carries the whole product or collapses under its own irony. Graveyard Keeper with Game of Crone bundled in mostly pulls it off. The base game drops you into a pixel-art medieval world as a graveyard keeper with no particular moral convictions, tasking you with managing corpse quality, building out your graveyard, running a church, brewing alcohol for the tavern, and slowly unraveling a genuinely weird narrative involving a communist donkey, a skull who only gives useful advice when drunk, and an Inquisitor who wants you to help burn witches. It is, frankly, a lot. The tech tree is dense and gated behind two separate experience point colors - green for physical crafts, blue for intellectual and religious work - and getting enough blue XP to unlock church upgrades is a slow, occasionally frustrating crawl that critics have rightly called out. Game of Crone is the third DLC expansion and it adds the meatiest new content of the lot: a refugee camp storyline where you house and supply Inquisition escapees, building their settlement up from a couple of tents and a campfire to something resembling a fortified community. Camp morale acts as a currency for construction - you feed and supply the refugees, morale rises, then you spend it on new buildings. It is a clever throttle on pacing, though if you arrive at this DLC already overleveled and resource-rich, the whole thing will feel trivially easy. Beyond the camp, the expansion adds a vampire hunt in the local village, Donkey's long-promised revolution arc, new craftable dishes, teleportation scrolls that fix one of the base game's most tedious friction points, and a bag system that finally lets you carry seeds without drowning in inventory slots. That bag mechanic alone is worth a raised eyebrow at the developers for not shipping it sooner. The narrative payoff is where opinions diverge. The writing stays consistently dry and deadpan - there is real wit in the social commentary baked into characters like the Bishop who cares only about food and the general store that will happily sell human meat if the margins work out. But if you came looking for branching choices with genuine consequence, you will find only shallow relationship-point systems. Agreeing to help the Inquisitor burns witches and earns perks; refusing costs you standing but nets cash. It is transactional, not transformative. The questlines in Game of Crone - including the vampire investigation and the secrets around your predecessor's death - add intrigue without dramatically deepening the narrative architecture. Players who grind through the main game looking for a revelation will get a decent footnote instead. Where this package earns its 'Very Positive' Steam rating is in its sheer density of interlocking systems: alchemy, farming, dungeon runs, zombie worker management, graveyard quality ratings, church sermon scheduling. For a certain kind of player - patient, spreadsheet-tolerant, happy to optimize corpse embalming at midnight - this is genuinely absorbing. For anyone expecting the gentle social warmth of comparable life sims or a horror-flavored experience that goes dark in interesting ways, the game's pitch-black comedy aesthetic can start to feel like a thin coat of paint over a fairly conventional resource grind. Performance complaints from some players post-DLC are real, though patches have addressed the worst of it. Buy the full bundle if you are already sold on grind-heavy management games with a mordant sense of humor. Play the base game well past hour 20 before touching Game of Crone, or the camp-building throttle will feel patronizing rather than paced. Newcomers who bounce off filler fetch loops within the first three hours will not be converted by anything the DLC adds.

Monika · Scout Team

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