Have a Nice Death Review (Chairman)
Some Game Recommendations
Similar Experience
Death Cells (One of the leaders of this type)
Blazblue Entrophy Effect (Has a character-based combo system, less randomness to runs)
Rogue Legacy 2 (Good variety and good to have meta upgrades)
Skull: The Hero Slayer (Fun gameplay and concept, not so easy gameplay, similarities with combat system)
Something Different
Hades (For having somewhat similar concept about death and rogue-lite)
Katamari Damacy Reroll (Has a weird humour to explore weird setting)
Death’s Door (Somewhat has a resemblance to the setting)
Review
Have a Nice Death is a roguelike platformer game with a setting around Death as a character and working environments. It has a nice flavour of humour with its satire attitude towards concepts like death and overworking. This is a definitive positive side of the game. It provides a fun ride with the characters and their relationships. Each area comes with a theme that involves around deaths like mental health, and wars. This way the game provides you change of events with new designs.
The gameplay is fast paced and there is no much of a problem I’ve encountered with playing Death. Our character has a scythe as a main weapon, it uses one button to create a combo with the character. Yet there are two slots for you to fill to give combat a flavour. There are many spells and cloak (weapon moves) for you to fill these slots. These abilities also have their own extra advantage for the user with bonusses they provide, and can be upgraded during the gameplay. This provides a variety on the runs you have. Yet one of the issues I had with the game is these abilities aren’t part of a combo or can be used to vary your combo. They’re basically spells for you to spam.
The game also has a skill tree that changes and resets each run. The skill three consists of 3 branches which are coloured red, blue and green. Red trees are mainly for buffing scythe or cloak attacks. Blue tree is for gaining several opportunities like gaining more run-based currencies (souls) or gaining more max HP. Finally, the green ones are to gaining more mana or increasing spell damage. Each branch has a level of 1-6. When levels are increased the possibilities of gaining more powerful skill increases. The number of possibilities and cursed possibilities you can get for each branch increases or decreases each run. This change sometimes encourages you to try another build and leave your comfort zone. But the other times it just ruins the build you make.
There are plenty of bosses, and they have good variables of attack moves, likewise the mobs have similar quantity. Maps have similar design for each area. If you spend few runs you start to get the outline of the maps, stages offer you. Each room has their own gifts for you to collect. These buffs can be collected after you beat the room’s challenge. These challenges are some enemies spawning in a locked room with an order, or defeating mini bosses. The gifts can be souls, upgrades, abilities, prisms (which are very rare run currency) and gold (used for meta progression and cosmetics). Most of these gifts are not game changing though.
The main issue most of the players have with the game, it is too difficult. This paragraph might spoil some of the secret story points so you can skip if you want to not get spoiled. The idea behind making the story keep going each time you completed a run is actually clever on the paper. But with each run it becomes harder, and I’m not so sure the third completion will be the final for the story. After beating the first final boss and wasn’t able to finish the game and seeing the final credits to learn there is more to story was neat thing to see first time. But after I defeated the next final boss who was a time machine maniac, I didn’t feel much of a relief because I knew there was another one right after beating him. Beating this guy was a big achievement on its own though (only %6 of the players was able to do this). But the process was pure on luck to have some over powered skills synced with the arsenal I had. I wasn’t able to get to that point after on. That was so disappointing to need a very good run, in order to face the final boss. Making the game this hard and making it as a rogue-lite game is definitely not a good decision in my opinion.
To put these in a short way this is a game with pretty solid characters, fun story and good gameplay. It suffers from some of the design decisions, that makes it harder to deal with and sometimes pure on luck. But in the end, I would totally recommend for most of the people who want to have a good time.