[Review] "Death and Taxes"

[Hamdii]

                                                                      

Released: Steam
Type: Single-player
Genre: Simulation, Casual
Adventure
Developer: Placeholder Gameworks
Publisher: Placeholder Gameworks
Release Date: Feb 20 2020

 

The Premise :

A new Grim Reaper recruit is here? Splendid! Welcome to your new job in an afterlife office! You are going to decide on who lives and who dies. You will do this by going through profiles of various people who are in dangerous situations, and based on their background and profession, you will decide who to save and who to end. Of course, there are also certain quotas to fulfil each day to keep the higher management happy, so don’t slip up, Reaper. You may begin your career as the judge of mankind!

 

 

 

Story and Characters : 

 

The game revolves around only a handful of prominent characters. There’s you the Reaper, your somewhat snooty boss Fate, his mischievous cat Lady Pawdington, a cheerful pirate skeleton shopkeeper Mortimer, and your inner voice of doubt that you often talk to when looking in the mirror.

 

The people whose profiles we mark we don’t really get to meet, and so they aren’t prominent characters. However, the majority of them have something interesting going for them, based solely on their profile, and many of them do have an effect on the human world which we do not get to see directly.

 

So, why are we doing this job, you may ask? Are we trying to keep the world in order or are we just there to be a cog in a tightly-controlled bureaucratic machine? You will likely be asking this question as you find out more and more about the setting of the game and your role within it.

 

 

Gameplay : 

 

So, our job is to mark profiles – either to doom them to death or to keep them alive. Seems simple enough on the surface, but has a lot more depth when we look more into it. First of all, the management gives us certain quotas, such as to make a certain number of people die each day or to have people of specific professions die. These quotas we can choose to follow to a tee or not at all, but each time we deviate even a bit, we get reprimanded by our boss and get no pay for that day’s work, and if we mess up too many times, we can even get fired.

                                                     

Another aspect we have to consider is the effect our choices have on the human world. We get a glimpse of those when reading news on the phone each day, which mention something about the people we’ve doomed or kept alive from the previous day. This, however, doesn’t tell us everything, and in fact the human world has several attributes such as economy, environment, and others, which get affected by all our choices. Some people’s existence or death will only have a small effect on those attributes, while others’ will have a very big one.
So, this is also something we have to consider when deciding the fate of each person. In that sense, there’s a great deal of choice and consequence in the game, and even though we might not see the effects of our choices right away, they can easily mount up later on.

 

The game takes place entirely within the corporate building – we work, sleep, and shop there. There is only one shop, which sells various items. Some of those items are purely for cosmetic purposes, such as to open up more options to customize our character’s look, while other items can be used as tools to help us when marking profiles. Some of those items can provide us with more information on the effects of our choices, which can be very useful, especially when replaying the game.

 

Edited March 19, 2020 by Hamdii
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