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. With this in mind, the background saving in this game is very user friendly, even if the game crashes. I couldn’t replicate it in my play time, but it could still happen. Thankfully, the auto save triggers on each new floor, and I didn’t lose my progress on that run. The game stuttered to a stop and then crashed. It happened while fighting five enemies in a sealed room. On a final note, I encountered one game crash while running through a dungeon. 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. Running around with limitations adds extra consequence to everything you do. This is the one way the game adds any challenge to the dungeons themselves. These range from reductions in maximum health to reduced ability damage to even hiding the entire heads-up display. 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. None of these carry over into subsequent runs. 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. Building Your ResourcesĬonsidering the simplicity of basic enemies, you might wonder why traverse these procedurally generated dungeons in the first place. To others, the polarity in difficulty will feel cheap. To some, this might be part of the challenge. This lets down your guard and lulls you into a false sense of ease. No matter the stage, basic enemies provide minimal resistance. However, unlike Returnal, the journey to each boss fight is a cakewalk. Naturally, this means you lose all that progress when you die. Much like Returnal, you build up your resources and skills as you progress. Where this causes problems is how boss fights are incorporated into the rogue-like formula. As you encounter later bosses, their patterns naturally grow more complicated. To boot, enemy attacks include their own choreography that adequately identifies itself most of the time. There is no confusion where attacks come from and what they look like. While generally monochrome, the game uses colors to enunciate attacks and differentiate them from each other perfectly. Inputs respond perfectly, and each input delivers something flashy, truly evoking a sense of power with each action you take. On that note, combat itself is well designed and engaging, especially the boss fights. It just misses the mark in the execution of its intentions due to the representations it uses and how the game uses them. I see the intention in this game as a means of depicting Death as a heartless CEO but in a stylized and humorous way. 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. Arguments can be made about interpretations of these, and I personally don’t think there is any intentional malice behind these choices. Another is Catherine Imamura, a geisha embodied by swirling water. Good examples are a boss named Will Hung that you encountered who has hanged himself.
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