I am looking for a new game, and Ian suggested Have a Nice Death (Magic Design Studios) on Game Pass. It’s a 2D roguelike-lite (my term for any game that is like Binding of Isaac) in which–wait. First of all, I thought I had played the demo for the game, but it was another game in which there is a cute Death character. And it also reminded me of Death’s Door (Acid Nerve) a bit, but probably just because of the word death in the title.
I just looked up the other game for which I played the demo. It was Death and Taxes (Placeholder Gameworks) in which you decide who lives an ddies. It’s not grim, though. It’s kind of perky and cute. At least, I think that’s what it was supposed to be. It didn’t hit me that way, and I quit after half an hour or so.
Anyway, I really liked the graphics in Have a Nice Death. It’s cute, but not cloying. It feels moody without being oppressive, either. I’ve included a trailer below (still deciding which one to include). Much of the background is in shades of black and white. There are flashes of color in the different attacks and such. Which, actually, is one of the issues I want to discuss later on. In general, the look of the game is one I like and gel with.
I will say that after playing for several hours a few days ago, my game was lost. Whether it was a glitch of the cloud save or me pressing Y to delete the save, I cannot say for sure. If it’s the latter, I would say to make it much clearer that you’re actually deleting a save because I was unpleasantly surprised when I booted up the game the next day and it turned out I had lost all the progress I had made the day before.
Side note, kind of: I have been thinking to buy this on Steam to support the dev. When I found out that I lost my game file, I thought that would have been a good time to buy it on Steam. Instead, I started up again on Game Pass and got back to where I had been in about an hour instead of two or three, and I beat the first big boss for the first time to boot.