Management simulations have been one of the most enduring video game genres. Whether you like to manage cities, zoos, hospitals or sports teams, there are plenty of riffs on the concept. With the current renaissance of the farming sim however, it's enough to loudly say "Stardew Valley" three times to summon interest - mine included. Graveyard Keeper, then, sounded like the kind of game I didn't know I wanted, something that combines the cute style of a game made in RPG Maker with a truly interesting management idea. It's graveyards. You manage graveyards.

The fun tone is presented as Graveyard Keeper's biggest draw. The game is neither sad nor drab, even though it has you handling dead bodies. Instead, it's likely going for that slightly tongue-in-cheek tone of a Tropico or Dungeon Keeper, asking you to suspend your disbelief and explore all the ways in which you can adapt familiar management mechanics to the theme. In Dungeon Keeper, you build S&M parlours to keep your populace happy, in Graveyard Keeper you...turn dead people into lunchmeat.

To get to that point however, a lot of other things need to happen first. The story is an afterthought: your character gets hit by a car one day and wakes in a different world to a sentient skull pronouncing him the keeper of the local graveyard. Your task is to find a way home, but also to mostly just roll with it. A talking donkey comes by and drops a corpse at your porch, the local bishop tells you to clean up the graveyard, and so you roll up your sleeves and get to it.

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Graveyard Keeper is a wonderful thing, even in its current alpha state. You can tell what you're in for just by glancing at the patch notes on the home screen: "Fixed crash when extracting brain/fat/etc." I love that breezy "etc." "Fixed camera freeze when talking to Astrologer." And the home screen itself is no less delightful than the patch notes: night-time in a medieval village done up in pixel-art. The edges of a church and a waterfall are picked out in blue, lit by the nearby moon. It is a calm, but somehow potent view: the promise of morbid adventure. It reminds me a bit of that sense of expectation you get wandering around Melee Island at night.

You arrive in Graveyard Keeper from the modern world, where you are in love and in traffic and not very good at watching where you are going. Following an auto collision you awake in a medieval village and find yourself in charge of a small rundown graveyard. Every day a new body arrives from a wry, socialist donkey. Every afternoon there are tutorial tips to engage with, dispensed by a talking skull who seems to have been a bit of a boozer in his past life.

The pitch, I think, is Stardew Valley meets Six Feet Under. The graveyard needs fixing up - a process that will require the steady accumulation of resources and the unlocking of the skills needed to make anything handy of them - while the nearby village is filled with eccentrics and tantalising mysteries. Graveyard Keeper is particularly good at dangling threads, in fact: the local pub owner tells you that a nearby Astrologer may be of help to you; the church in the graveyard is locked, but may be accessible if you dig your way into its crypt. I am a few hours in and there are so many separate things I am working towards. The inquisition is in town: do I want to become a spy? Do I want to take on a garden as well as my graveyard? Do I want to see what's going on over by the nearby lighthouse?

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Developer Lazy Bear Games has released the first gameplay trailer for its intriguing new cemetery management sim Graveyard Keeper - which has more than a hint of Stardew Valley about it, albeit ripe with the stench of corpses.

Lazy Bear, which previous created boxing management game Punch Club, describes Graveyard Keeper as "the most inaccurate medieval cemetery management sim of all time".

Your goal is to build, expand, and manage your own graveyard, "while finding shortcuts to cut costs, expand into entertainment with witch-burning festivals, and scare nearby villagers into attending church". As you'd expect, there are locals to impress, crops to be farmed, resources to be gathered for crafting purposes, and even a spot of alchemy.

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