First Impressions With Have a Nice Death
Burnout is a real thing. It’s kind of the reason I took the last month off of releasing writing and videos following the Game of the Year post. My vacation lining up with the last two weeks of the year being Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve helped a lot in the decision. But by virtue of the way my release schedule works, I kind of can’t just take a week off, especially with mid-February to early March shaping up to be another late winter pop-off like last year. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The reason I bring up the insider baseball stuff is that it’s January, it’s the calm before the storm and it dovetails quite nicely into the topic of this week, Have a Nice Death.
Currently in Early Access development from Magic Designs Studios and published by Gearbox publishing; Have a Nice Death is a 2D action-platformer Roguelike with hack n’ slash combat. Don’t look at me like that, it’s 2023 and you’re following my work. You should know by now that this stuff is basically my brand at this point. The setup is as such: Death, having reaped the souls of the living since time immemorial, is starting to feel the weight of his cosmic duty and decides to do the worst thing someone can do in a similar situation as them: going corporate. He founded Death Inc. in the hopes that he can just get a cushy office job, stamping paperwork. But when he summons the Sorrows, beings that can control various ways humans die, he gets more than he bargained for. Now, with the Sorrows running rampant, buried under mountains of paperwork and on the verge of burnout from menial stamping, Death dons his signature black cloak and trusty scythe to get his company back under control and hopefully, get a vacation out of it in the process.
Have a Nice Death is a grimly comedic portrayal of quota-driven corporate cultures and their effects on the people who work in those systems. Burnout, suicide, addiction, harassment and anxiety are all themes that are tackled in this manner and do their best to illustrate how much this place sucks. If there’s one thing I can appreciate about it so far though is that the narrative and the characters in it actively go out of their way to point out that Death’s laissez-faire management style is the reason things are so messed up. Often to his face. It’s pretty funny.
And this is even reflected in the areas that you go through in the company headquarters. Areas focused on those ideas for reaping human souls I mentioned earlier are front and centre in the forms of landfills, paperwork-filled offices, sludge-soaked refineries and arms depots. I’m keeping it vague at the moment because I’m trying to not get too spoiler-y. There’s some delightfully twisted imagery in this one that I feel makes the content warning at the beginning of the game warranted.
Once you get into the game, you see what Have a Nice Death has on offer. It’s your standard side-scrolling action platformer Roguelike and one that has some surprises up its sleeves as well. As Death himself, you have access to a wide array of weapons and dark magic at his disposal to aid in getting your middle managers back in order. Chief among them is your trusty scythe. The scythe is your best friend for taking on the out-of-control employees of Death Inc. and it can take a lot of different shapes to do so. A pair of sickles, a chain scythe that’s basically a kusarigama, and a goddamn parasol are the main weapons and all of them are fast and furious in their death-dealing methods. There's also a wide array of ancient sub-weapons that help even the odds, from darkness-infused throwing stars, dual daggers that make you lunge forward, rapiers, bows, and even a goddamn rocket launcher. And trust me when I say that you are going to need them.
The employees of Death Inc. running rampant to ensure their quotas of human souls is…a bit of an understatement. They’ll throw everything they got at you to avoid getting written up, the Sorrows in particular. These are some of the nastiest enemies in the game and will test your mechanical skills. But these fights can come off as a bit unfair since it feels like they're doing more damage than it feels they should be right now. But it’s early access, so I’ll chalk it up to balance not being a priority at the moment.
Lastly, there’s the meta progression: It’s some standard stuff here, pay gold to unlock stuff in between runs, but the way all of that is flavoured is the best part. Since Death can’t die for obvious reasons, he instead just gets bamf’d back to his office where he instead gets a performance review of how well he did and uses that knowledge to go back and do it again. It’s basically the same thing as Zagreus getting sent back to the House of Hades whenever he dies in Hades, so I’m cool with it. There’s also a bunch of risk-reward stuff with the boons and curses from the company safety inspector, Tony O’Shah (really laying it on thick, huh?), which go out of their way to make your build that right level of spicy.
Even though it’s in Early Access, Have a Nice Death shows a lot of promise. While the combat in some areas could be shined up in between major systems updates and additions, there’s a damn good set of bones under the cloak here. I’m really looking forward to when this releases.
