PC Review Code Provided by Gearbox Publishing
It’s been one year since Have A Nice Death first went into Early Access on Steam and since then Magic Design Studios and Gearbox Publishing have been dishing out updates for their game. Learning more about this game through our interview and an initial hands-on first impression, the hype for this rogue-like hack ‘n’ scythe has grown quite a bit. With the game’s launch just a week away, it’s time to break down what this title has to offer and whether or not it is as entertaining as many hope it to be.
Story
After getting overwhelmed with the task of collecting souls when it was their time, death created a handful of new employees to take care of the soul collecting for him. These new employees are known as Sorrows and they were each given a different aspect of death to collect souls from. But as time went on, they started to get overzealous and skilled in their work, collecting so many souls so quickly that the burden of soul collecting has turned into a burden of paperwork processing for the owner of Death Inc.!
Fed up with the purposeful over-collecting from all the different Sorrows, not to mention the lack of respect they have grown to show towards the owner of the underworld company, it is time to put them back in their place! As the owner of Death Inc., death is the only one capable of pulling off this job, and so he sets out to take back control of his underworld company that has officially run amok.
Honestly, the story is simplistic and cutesy given the overall theme of the game. I like how they managed to give this game a story that is easy to follow and even easier to get behind. The challenge comes with actually getting the task done!
Gameplay
As with any roguelike, you aren’t going to beat this game on your first run. Each attempt to complete the game will be met with a score at the end of it. This score is applied to your overall character, leveling you up and earning the in-game currency of golden ingots to purchase new weapons, attacks, and more. Everything you need to know or want to check up on can be found at your home hub, or office, where they have your stats, unlocked weapons, and more available at different stations.
For each run attempted, there will be a mix of randomization and choice-making along with the usual skills to fight through. When you first start, you don’t have a lot of options, but once you start unlocking more weapons and reaching higher levels, the options begin to appear. It won’t be long before there will be a weapon stop at the start of the run where you can choose from three randomly selected types of Scythes that you have unlocked. It seems the standard “Scythe” is always available, but my personal favorite quickly became “DIss Scythe.”
Other than your scythe, your other attacks will either be a special attack with a cooldown or a magical attack that cost mana. Mana automatically recharges, which forms a sort of cooldown for the magic attacks. It is best to only have one spell attack that cost mana due to the shared cooldown, but I did find myself preferring more of the special attacks over magical ones. These side attacks completely change the approach you can take to enemies. You’ll get these from the occasional enemy that you take down, but it seemed completely random who dropped it. If you take an elevator that jumps you to a boss fight, you will almost always find one there since you will have nothing else to assist your fight with sorrow taking the direct route.
Along with these special attacks, enemies drop all sorts of goodies to collect. You can collect souls, which are used as mid-run currency at shops and the control room to upgrade your weapons, as well as Vitem’s and Anima’s. Vitem’s might as well be short for Vitamin as it gives a permanent-during-the-current-run boost to your health or mana while Anima’s are collected to provide an at-will health boost. Anima’s come in blue or gold colors with the blue ones only healing your injuries (the gray part of your health bar) and the gold ones healing directly, including the lost health bar to injuries. However, keep in mind that you only have three slots for Anima’s and so if you collect a blue while you are fully stocked, it will turn a stocked blue Anima into a gold one, but if you are fully stocked with gold, it will simply be lost.
Before moving forward, Anima’s are also how you open secret rooms. If you see a ghost lock appear for a second, which it won’t reappear so keep your eyes sharp, and then use an Anima next to it, it will open a secret room. In there you can find anything from more Anima’s to power-ups and more.
Combat in this game is different according to your weapons and abilities collected, but the attack style is the same. Each weapon has a direct combo attack, an upward attack that will launch you into the air, a downward attack that will either slam you back down if you are in the area or slice either side of you if you are on the ground, and you can combine them in any way you want. It is rather fast-paced, so don’t be shy to dash around the attacks from enemies and take your time landing your hits because you have a long way to go. Dashing is one of the only ways to avoid getting hit, so it will definitely be something you need to master utilizing.
Each enemy, from the minions to the sorrows, has their own attack styles. They do make things interesting by offering option mini-bosses known as ‘Thanagers’ for you to take on if you want and the sorrow’s at the end of the chapter can have one of two fighting styles set up when you reach them. So, not only do you need to learn the enemy’s attack style, but you will need to learn two styles from the final boss of the section. I personally avoided the Thanagers mostly because they don’t give enough reward when you beat them to justify the health loss on a roguelike, but they do add an interesting challenge for the replayability aspect.
As for the choice-making aspect I mentioned, each area of the game is broken up into multiple floors you have to get through. At the end of each floor, you will find an elevator that signifies you have completed this section. Taking the elevator to the next floor will lead you to the choice between one to four floors. They are all pretty self-explanatory as to what you can find in them - vault being golden ingots, anima department being anima’s, soulary being for soul’s, and so on. There are a few floors that will give you a random experience such as the intriguing floor which provides a different challenge to complete each time or the hazardous floor which could be just about anything. The more runs you complete, the more floor options you’ll be given. Even after you beat a boss and are heading to the next section of the game, you’ll get to choose between two different section options.
Other than your pathways, you will also need to decide which upgrades you want. You will run into a character named Mr. O’Shah (haha, OSHA) and he will offer you the choice of three cards. These will follow either the Red, Blue, or Green upgrade tree, and the tree starts fresh with each run. The majority of the cards are simply an upgrade for you during this run, but sometimes they come with a curse as well. Don’t worry though, you can get curse re-roll opportunities as well to change these up if you don’t like what you have been dealt. You can also pass up Mr. O’Shah if you don’t want to deal with his upgrades at all.
Audio and Visuals
The art style of this game is the cutesy version of a macabre-fans world. There is death, skeletons, and all the aspects you would expect to find in any Halloween or gothic-themed world, but instead of it giving the environment an atmosphere of doom and gloom, it has a cartoon-style corporate feel to it. It literally looks like there could be a cartoon show about the day in the life of Death Inc. I personally love that they managed to make it look so fun and artsy given a dark theme with a comical plot. This aspect alone is sure to catch many players’ attention.
Good thing that isn’t all though as the music in this game is just as fun and creative as the aesthetic. At no point in the game did the music feel like it was a drag or driven by the negative essence of the macabre underworld environment. It maintained an upbeat, entertaining tone that really brought out the cartoonistic atmosphere of this game’s world of Death Inc. and its many floors. Truly well blended from all the senses.
Replayability
Given the game is a rogue-like, there is definitely replayability. The genre is built around this aspect after all! Other than the fact that you keep doing runs until you make it all the way through, there are different things you can unlock by beating the game more than once. The leveling system that unlocks more aspects and even fast-track elevators is a factor, along with the golden ingots that you collect and earn each run to buy various things from the home shops, and there are even a few items unlocked directly by beating the game more than once. They definitely had replayability in mind when developing this game.
What It Could Have Done Better
Since I unlocked the different scythes, why did I still have to hope the one I like is available each run? I didn’t care for the standard scythe option very much, but it was always available, yet the one I did like was only sometimes available. There is even a spot in the hub base where I can switch out my scythe with the ones I have unlocked, presumably to try them out, but then they force it back to the standard scythe before you leave. It would be better if we could use that spot to pick which scythe we would like to be our default choice and let the randomized scythe options in each run be for when we want to try something different.
Other than that, my nit-picky complaint is that it takes too long in the levels gained to unlock the elevators that fast-track to the second and third-tier bosses. You get the first elevator to Brad within 2-3 hours of the game, but the next tier elevator to the second boss doesn’t unlock until a higher level which will take a much more significant amount of time to unlock. When you are stuck on the third-tier bosses and just want to keep getting to them, a fast track to the first two bosses would have been great to utilize a lot sooner.
Verdict
Have A Nice Death is a wonderfully amusing roguelike that I don’t intend to stop just because I’ve beaten it once so far! There are more bosses to fight, more floors to discover, and those nasty Thanagers that deserve their takedowns as well. The replayability of this game is outstanding, even with such a simple premise to the game. While there are some annoyances to get over, this is one of the most entertaining versions of roguelike gameplay I’ve played so far! This is definitely a title I recommend!
Have A Nice Death is available now on Steam’s early access and will fully launch for both PC and Nintendo Switch on March 22nd.
