Have a Nice Death Review: Fear the Reaper

In the end, Have a Nice Death can’t escape its own premise.

Have a Nice Death
Photo: Gearbox Publishing

The Grim Reaper makes for a highly relatable protagonist in developer Magic Design Studios’s Have a Nice Death. As the undyingly stressed-out CEO of Death Incorporated, players must fight their way through a literal corporate hell (take that, Severance) to figure out who’s sabotaging the company and, more importantly, how to take a vacation. Outstanding comic writing on par with Hades helps to punch up each procedurally generated run and help you get to better know your employees as they celebrate holidays like April Ghoul’s Day, threaten to go on strike, or lodge complaints about the uneven air conditioning.

But Have a Nice Death can’t escape its own premise. As it loops in on itself, every day an increasingly soul-crushing Monday, the new dialogue dwindles and players have no more lore to unlock about their weapons and the dozens of enemies they’re used on throughout the game’s departments. It doesn’t take players nearly as long as Death to face the same problem: burnout.

As the intro makes clear, Death is stuck doing the same thing day in and day out, and it doesn’t always feel like there are enough options for him—or you—to shake things up. At heart, that’s rooted in Death’s weapon of choice: a scythe. There are seven different versions of the weapon here, from the speedy Sickles to the string-bladed, almost yo-yo-like Diss Scythe. But while you can choose from three of these at the start of each run, they don’t feel all that different.

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Real variety comes from your 23 so-called “cloak” weapons, from the Shake Spear to the Slaymore, and the 41 spells to be found, but there’s no guarantee you’ll discover any of these things during a playthrough. You may be left having to engage dangerous foes at close range, which proves difficult when dealing with flying foes that you can only reach with an attack or two at a time, rather than the full breadth of a melee combo. There’s also little synergy in swapping between the various weapons and spells, even when you have one of each, because the Red skill tree boosts weapons, Blue aids in survivability, and Green focuses on magic, so it’s likely that at least one of your three modes of attack will be considerably less powerful.

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That’s not to say that the game always feels like work. The early runs, where you’re still learning how everything works, are exhilarating. There are some great ideas in how combat is handled, with a special attack “frenzy” meter filling up based on how varied your combos are, and two tiers of healing items, one that takes care of immediate injuries and one that treats long-term damage. The office-related jokes and concerns are familiar in the best possible sense, and often have longer-term payouts, especially when you realize that the sitcom-y riffs on The Office aren’t accidental, as proven by the direct callout to the show’s stapler-in-Jell-O prank.

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Have a Nice Death is also a beautifully macabre game: Think Edward Gorey by way of Rayman, with highly colorful and often anthropomorphized creatures depicted in ghoulish ways, like the Caderacts found in the Modern Warfare department, a missile poking through one eye, or the Ulcermonners of the Physical Illness level that are enemy-summoning ulcers. The optional mid-boss thanagers are particularly detailed, like W. Hung, who’s actually the sentient noose around a former employee’s neck, or Slyma, a now-sentient barrel of radioactive waste that’s been made into a pet by the Industrial Pollution zone’s boss, Mr. Gordon Grimes.

But as you unlock further departments and face more powerful foes across Have a Nice Death, the runs begin to grow repetitious. The jokes are fewer and farther between, and some begin to feel almost as if they’re at the player’s expense. Granted, these are issues with all roguelikes, but it’s hard not to think about similarly themed games about the business of death (like Death’s Door or Grim Fandango) and how much more tightly focused and compelling they are. The ability to unlock express elevators that skip entire departments is a nice concession, but it also acknowledges just how skippable whole swathes of the game quickly become.

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Have a Nice Death has been steadily cranking out content for just over a year in Early Access, and there are some nice combat-related surprises in store for players, like the rare alternative bosses that sometimes pop up in departments you’d long since thought you had mastered. But there still seems to be barely enough variety here to compel players to find the secret ending, let alone to keep replaying on increasingly harder “breakdowns” (the game’s version of difficulties). Turns out, the game’s comic perversion of R.I.P. is truer than it knows. There’s no peace to be found in this endless depiction of Death’s toil, only (paper)work.

This game was reviewed with code provided by fortyseven communications.

Score: 
 Developer: Magic Design Studios  Publisher: Gearbox Publishing  Platform: PC  Release Date: March 22, 2023  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Violence  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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