Have A Nice Death PS5 Review – Indie games are so great. They give us as gamers new ways to experience and play genres we think we know inside and out. That’s where games like Have A Nice Death come in, trying new things in terms of pacing a rogue-like. While it’s not the most cohesive offering out there, the excellent combat will keep you coming back for more.
Have A Nice Death Review (PS5) – A Somewhat Disconnected Concept With Absolutely Fantastic Combat
The Grim Reaper, Death himself, stands as the CEO of a company that deals in death. In his burnout from work, he lets too many things slacken, and his underlings start to take certain matters into their own hands. In particular, they start taking more and more souls than expected, overburdening him with paperwork to file. Now, Death needs to find all of his rogue subordinates and get them back in line.
From a conceptual perspective, there’s a heavy-handed dose of tongue-in-cheek presentation to it all, adding an intended humorous twist on the element of death. In the beginning it feels like that, even bringing in the suck-up employee that lets Grim beat on him for a laugh. That’s where the humor stumbles: how it turns the corporate treatment of its employees into a joke. There are ways to do this kind of thing, but most of these scenarios are turned into a laugh instead of shown negatively.
Good examples are a boss named Will Hung that you encountered who has hanged himself. Another is Catherine Imamura, a geisha embodied by swirling water. Arguments can be made about interpretations of these, and I personally don’t think there is any intentional malice behind these choices. In most cases, businesses try to sweep work-induced injuries or self-harm under the rug or they avoid as much cost as possible when dealing with natural disasters. I see the intention in this game as a means of depicting Death as a heartless CEO but in a stylized and humorous way. It just misses the mark in the execution of its intentions due to the representations it uses and how the game uses them.
Flashy, Slashy Fun Times
On that note, combat itself is well designed and engaging, especially the boss fights. Inputs respond perfectly, and each input delivers something flashy, truly evoking a sense of power with each action you take. The same goes for your enemies. While generally monochrome, the game uses colors to enunciate attacks and differentiate them from each other perfectly. There is no confusion where attacks come from and what they look like.
To boot, enemy attacks include their own choreography that adequately identifies itself most of the time. As you encounter later bosses, their patterns naturally grow more complicated. Where this causes problems is how boss fights are incorporated into the rogue-like formula.
Much like Returnal, you build up your resources and skills as you progress. Naturally, this means you lose all that progress when you die. However, unlike Returnal, the journey to each boss fight is a cakewalk. No matter the stage, basic enemies provide minimal resistance. This lets down your guard and lulls you into a false sense of ease. To some, this might be part of the challenge. To others, the polarity in difficulty will feel cheap.
Building Your Resources
Considering the simplicity of basic enemies, you might wonder why traverse these procedurally generated dungeons in the first place. Though the game occasionally lets you bypass levels and go straight to a boss, you do miss chances to increase your damage, health, and mana as well as pick up spells and abilities.
None of these carry over into subsequent runs. What you collect is what you use. To make things more interesting, curses come along with certain pickups, forcing you to take a hindrance in exchange for the beneficial ability you grabbed. These range from reductions in maximum health to reduced ability damage to even hiding the entire heads-up display.
This is the one way the game adds any challenge to the dungeons themselves. Running around with limitations adds extra consequence to everything you do. Either way, you still don’t need to worry about any random enemy randomly killing you, like what potentially and regularly happens with basic enemies in Soulsborne games.
On a final note, I encountered one game crash while running through a dungeon. It happened while fighting five enemies in a sealed room. The game stuttered to a stop and then crashed. Thankfully, the auto save triggers on each new floor, and I didn’t lose my progress on that run. I couldn’t replicate it in my play time, but it could still happen. With this in mind, the background saving in this game is very user friendly, even if the game crashes.
A Good Time Despite Itself
Have A Nice Death tries to carve out its own niche in the rogue-like genre with more of a focus on boss fights than exploration. While the game provides great boss fights and some engaging ability and stat management, it lacks a balance in difficulty between exploration and boss fights.
There’s also a disconnect in what humor and themes the game tries to do versus what the game actually delivers. This is the biggest shame, because the boss fights themselves are engaging and well choreographed without being easy or too hard. Plus, combat is just an absolute blast. Cohesiveness isn’t quite there on multiple fronts, but this is still a sleeper rogue-like just waiting to be played.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.