Graveyard Keeper - Game of Crone (DLC)

Graveyard Keeper is a management sim with a surprisingly thick RPG spine underneath all the grave-digging and corpse-processing. You play a modern-day nobody yanked back in time and dumped in charge of a crumbling medieval cemetery. From there, the game opens into a sprawling web of crafting chains, NPC quest lines, and resource loops that demand you balance the graveyard's reputation against your own morally flexible decision-making. The Game of Crone DLC layers a new character, the Crone, on top of that foundation, extending the story and adding fresh dialogue branches that reward players who already know the base game's cast. The writing is where Graveyard Keeper earns its goodwill. The humor is deadpan and genuinely weird, poking at bureaucracy, religion, and the grim economics of death without ever getting preachy about it. The Crone herself is a highlight, a sharp-tongued presence whose conversations add context to lore threads the base game leaves deliberately vague. If you care about whether NPCs feel like people rather than quest dispensers, this DLC is worth the attention. Choices do matter here, though less in the branching CRPG sense and more in the resource and reputation sense: some paths lock you out of others, and the game is comfortable letting you make a mess. The simulation side is genuinely deep but has a patience tax. Crafting trees branch in satisfying directions, and unlocking embalming techniques or church upgrades feels earned. The grind, however, is real. XP gains across the blue, green, and red skill trees trickle in slowly, and early hours involve a lot of trips between the same four locations waiting for in-game days to tick over. This is not a crisis, but players expecting the narrative momentum of a traditional RPG will hit some wall-staring moments. The Game of Crone content is gated behind base-game progress, so you will feel the pacing before you reach it. Combat exists but is deliberately minimal, more of a chore mechanic than a system. Build variety is light: you are optimizing a workflow, not a character sheet. Where the game shines is in its atmosphere, the pixel art is genuinely lovely at night, the score fits the morbid cosiness, and the sense that your graveyard is slowly becoming something grotesquely impressive is a real and specific pleasure. The Metacritic score of 69 undersells how much personality the thing has; it also fairly reflects that the loop is not for everyone. If you bounced off the base game's early grind, the DLC will not fix that. If you made it past the first few hours and found yourself invested in the Astrologer's questline or the town's weird political theology, the Game of Crone is exactly the kind of additional content that respects your time already spent. It expands what was interesting, leaves what was tedious roughly unchanged, and closes out some story beats with enough wit to make the whole thing feel like a proper ending.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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