Have a Nice Death is a punishing roguelike with a dark sense of humor

We have time to wait until Hades 2, And if you need a roguelike to fill the hole borrowed Left behind, then Have a pleasant death You have to do well. I had a chance to try the game first at GDC and then again now that it’s out and Nintendo Switch, and I was immediately blown away by the dark humor and easy-to-pick-up (but hard-to-master) combat.

You play as Death, the CEO of Death Incorporated, who has outsourced the job of soul harvesting to their trusted underlings, who after many millennia of processing mortals, decide to go berserk and unleash the well-oiled machine of death and dying. As their boss, it’s your job Traversing the bowels of the Death Inc campus, defeating these so-called “teenagers” (that’s a very good pun). Along the way, you earn perks, skills, and weapons that do your job of bringing your unruly employees to heel.

The opening cinema for Have a pleasant death It is extremely shocking. First, you are a peasant farmer reaper, staying long enough to see his wife collapse in tears over her husband’s body. Next, you take a dying woman in a hospital bed as her grieving family clings to her in her last painful moments. After that, you take a guy who was in a car accident, his lifeless body littered with shards of glass and hanging out of the windshield. From there, it’s a montage of all the people death takes, turning from individual stories we spend a second or two with into a blur of harvest after harvest, flattening the dying into a constant stream of faces without name or personality.

I don’t think the developers intended this as the rest of the game is quite poignant about death and all the dumb ways humans can die, but it was a neat, if unsettling, metaphor for how we’ve become thinkers of the everyday tragedy of life.

Death starts each run with their signature scythe weapon. As they make their way through the corridors of Death Inc, defeating the unrepentant underlings, they can pick up spells and secondary weapons that require an extra punch when performing combos. Combat, therefore, becomes extremely diverse. I enjoyed mixing and matching weapons and spells combined with curses that function almost like the divine rewards from borrowed, can result in some pretty unique configurations.

The problem is, though, I die too quickly before I can really figure out what works for me. It’s probably a “be good” mode, but enemies hit like a crazy truck, and my general strategy of taking a few shots to the face doesn’t serve me very well. Furthermore, Hand Is that cheeky thing where, after a few deaths, he asks, “Would you like to switch to easy mode?” I know this isn’t teasing me on purpose, and easy modes are a good thing for people who want to try something outside of their comfort zone or for the limited video game critic, but it feels like teasing and makes me want to throw my Switch across the room. How dare you, a still collection of code and art, how the hell dare you.

It also feels like the game is very stingy with how it hands out healing items. You start with one potion and can earn up to two more, but they don’t seem to heal you much (and there’s an annoying health mechanic where taking damage can reduce your total HP total that normal potions won’t restore), and earning them is a very rare treat.

The seemingly punishing difficulty is offset by the fact that various floors of Death Inc, while intricately designed with multiple levels to ride up or down, feel a little too empty. Enemies do not come to you in waves; You have to find them behind breakable barriers and just off-screen platforms. Not a deal breaker – it just feels a bit thin.

If I can get over my growing pains with the game, I think Have a pleasant death It’s a perfect little pick up and drop game. It’s not something that feels like you have to complete it or even marathon it, but rather a little meeting game where you can make some progress, then put it down and pick it up again when the mood strikes. And I like those types of games that don’t make significant demands on my time, especially Zelda’s legend rises to very great distances.

Have a pleasant death Available now for PC and Nintendo Switch.