Have a Nice Death

I put a lot of hours into Have a Nice Death across multiple playthroughs, and the thing that kept pulling me back was not the scythe combos or the boss patterns - though both are genuinely excellent - it was the writing. Magic Design Studios built a comedic corporate underworld where every item description is a dry workplace joke, every department has its own absurdist flavour, and the Sorrows who serve as your boss encounters each carry a personality that evolves the more times you fight them. This is a studio that clearly thought hard about what makes a roguelite world feel alive between the action, drawing a clear line from the Hades school of contextual dialogue. The combat loop is tight. Death carries a primary scythe that can be transformed into variants - twin sickles (Twinsie), a chained ranged version (Diss Scythe), and others unlocked via Prismium in the hub's Control Room. Alongside the scythe you slot in two sub-weapons: Cloak weapons with cooldown timers and mana-based Spells from the Pitbook. The three categories synergise through Curses offered by T. O'Shah, and the best runs are the ones where you commit a build around one weapon type and let the passive upgrades compound. That specificity is rewarding, but it also means a badly seeded run - too many weapons you cannot use, too little Prismium showing up - can feel stingy rather than challenging. Some community criticism around the long-term progression being thin is fair; the permanent upgrade layer is deliberately lean, so growth comes from skill and familiarity rather than unlocked stats, which will frustrate players used to rogue-lites with deeper meta-progression like Rogue Legacy 2. What the game absolutely nails is feel. The animation is buttery, every hit lands with audio weight, and the colour-sparse black-and-white art style - splashed with purple for Cloak attacks and green for Spells - is one of the more intentional visual decisions I have seen in the genre. The soundtrack earns special mention: each department has its own musical identity, and the jingle that greets you back at Death's office after a failed run lands differently depending on how far you got. It is the kind of score that makes a 30-minute run feel like it has a shape. The weaknesses are real and worth knowing before you commit. Level design is procedurally generated and the templates can repeat in ways that feel familiar faster than they should. Difficulty spikes hard at the boss layer - regular enemies rarely threaten a careful player, but the Sorrows have multi-phase patterns that gain new moves the more encounters you log, which keeps them fresh but also means early runs can feel like paying a toll before the game fully opens up. The stat numbers in the menus are a minor readability problem that several reviewers flagged, and the difficulty mode called Imminent Breakdown is the default start, so newcomers who do not find the Self-Fulfillment assist option in the hub after their first death will have a rougher introduction than necessary. For the right player this is a genuinely crafted piece of work. It sits comfortably alongside the best of the genre without pretending to reinvent it. The corporate-death satire has real warmth underneath the gallows humour, the combat loop rewards investment, and the soundtrack alone justifies headphones. Slow starter, high ceiling.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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