Death and Taxes

nice

Honestly, if you want to hold the power of life and death in your hands, this is your game. You are the Grim Reaper and the fate of mankind is in your hands and your hands alone! Play this ultra fun game today!

Just to be clear: in this game you are the Grim Reaper (a skeleton of sorts) hired by the Fate to kill people. Every morning you get a bunch of profiles and the dummiest instructions ever ("Kill two", or at most "Kill six, spare the retired, get rid of the scientists"). Later in the game they get even dummier ("Follow the flow." Sorry, WHAT?) The game's claim is: "Your choices have consequences". Choices? Consequences? Really? Problem is: if you blindly follow the instructions you ALWAYS win, no matter what. First game, day one. Get to the job, pick a few random profiles, kill them. Easy peasy. Report to the boss: good job. Day two: read the news on your phone (apparently someone acknowledges your job!), follow the new instructions, kill, report. Day three: same (don't bother to read the news: after a while they are not funny anymore). Day four: same. At the end of the week the job is yours. Nothing changes, though. So, let's visit the shop, where you can buy a few useless gizmos. My first one, a mirror for my room. Needless to say, the mirror hosts a ghostly voice (a female one, BTW: now, THIS is sexist, you know?) And the voice begins to mock me: "Are you proud of all that killing? Don't you feel guilty?" ("No, ma'am: why on Earth should I? I'm the Reaper, remember?") Wonderful. Let's just ignore the shop from now on, would we? Week two, day one: same as above. And again, and again. Chit-chat with the boss ("Humankind is useless and life is pointless". "I know, right? I'm the Reaper, after all.") Repeat until only two humans are left. Kill them. That's it: you win, humankind extint, game over. Wait a moment, that was far too easy. Play again, try something different. Get the trial week, ignore the instructions and kill all the subjects -- you get fired. Oh, so you CAN lose after all. Good to know. Uninstall. Bottom line: a boring, pointless and truly disappointing game, to the uttermost level; they may have been just 8€, but they were money wasted anyway.

It is sold as in the vein of narrative-based titles as "Papers, Please", "Beholder", etc. It is not really, there is a very obvious right and wrong. There is not much subtlety, not some many sensible choices. Not to mention that the game ask you to finish off people with criteria such as age ("kill off every gramp from this batch") but at the same time promote some garbage english using plural form "they" instead of him/her, as i, it mattered how people would enjoy being referred to at the time of death. And to state the obvious, if him or her is misnaming, why the age or the profession of a character is not? Maybe granpa feel like a kid, afterall.

The gameplay is simple and straight forward. The voice acting and writing are both witty, and contain some interesting insights all around. The customizing avatar is of course what's expected this days, next. And you do get the mercy of a New Game Plus when you inevitably come to the Bad End first time around. And the precious few characters there are manage to be endearing in spite of their brief interactions. But there's a problem... spoilers. The game is so friggin' MANIPULATIVE! You are presented with some black and white things with some obviously corrupt people with no sense of empathy who's end would make the world a better place... but the game becomes increasingly blurry as anything remotely resembling right-wing politics is treated as a one-way road to the end of the world... and apparently Walt Disney would have helped established a fascist Hell if he'd lived longer (Walt was many things, but being a fascist wasn't one of them) ... And of course slaps you with the 'nothingness after death' halfway through. Oh, and there are some very obvious Terry Pratchett references, of whom I am NOT a fan of his work, but that's a minor beef compared to the rest. The left wing views grow from subtle to outright vicious by the end. I couldn't bring myself to play through the New World Plus knowing I'd have to basically parrot left wing policy... basically like how you'd admonished by one of the other characters for parroting Fate's policies.