Have a Nice Death PC Review

You need to hack and slash your way through every enemy you can because that feeling inside compels you to do so. Your scythe is endlessly cracking through the skulls and goo-like bodies of your enemies. Do you know why you do it? Why does Death do what Death does in this game? Well, if you’re an omnipotent being like Death itself, you may discover that after millennia of killing people, you’re actually just really bored of your existence, so you retire from the field and get a nice office job instead, but after ages of that, you get burnout. That’s how Have a Nice Death opens.

After a fantastic intro cinematic that conveys everything it needs to convey without a single line of dialogue in which Death, the protagonist, is shown to have once been a being who went out into the world and did all the killing itself, but things changed. It became a monotonous chore and there are also just far too many humans to kill out there. So, during Death’s time away from the human realm, it became a far weaker creature as it committed itself to admin work instead of fieldwork.

 

Have a Nice Death is a game that pits you up against the forces of the underworld in your attempt to defeat the burnout that comes from centuries of doing a boring office job rather than getting out there and killing everyone yourself. This game, which was developed by Magic Design Studios and published by Gearbox Publishing of all companies, is a roguelike hack and slash experience in which you traverse the various Departments of the underworld in an attempt to kill all the monsters that Death created when it decided to do an office job instead of the hands-on job it’d been doing before.

The 2D hack and slash gameplay is fast, fluid, and immensely enjoyable to play. It involves a lot of dodging and learning enemy movesets. In this sense, Have a Nice Death is somewhat similar to something like Dark Souls, in which you need to slash your way through enemies while also learning the best way to deal with each of those enemies, as each of them is very unique. Additionally, each of the enemies that Death faces in this roguelike adventure through the Departments of Death, Inc. has its own specific projections. So, it isn’t too difficult to know when to dodge and when to strike so long as you take some time studying your foes.

While Have a Nice Death has a much more fluid and fast-paced hack and slash style to it, it does come across as somewhat similar to something like Hollow Knight. Unlike Hollow Knight though, Have a Nice Death does not have a more standard linear story that is told through a single, hand-crafted world with a specific beginning and end. It is not a metroidvania, it is very much a hack and slash roguelike with minimal overall exploration. So, if you want something focused on exploration, and from the outside, this game could look like a metroidvania, then this isn’t for you because it isn’t that. It’s all about the combat.

 

The basic structure of a run in Have a Nice Death goes like this. You, as Death, head down from your office and enter the combat portion of the game. This involves trying to reach the end of the underworld by going through each of the corporate-style Departments that the world is populated with, such as the Industrial Pollutant Department and the Toxic Food Processing Department. Each of the Departments in the game act as a series of levels that are procedurally generated in the roguelike tradition.

You make your way through multiple floors of each Department, and you get to choose which floor you go to next by the reward that you’ll receive from it. So, it goes like this, you get to the elevator at the end of a level and the elevator asks you if you want to go to a floor that has health, gold, or upgrade points in it. You choose whichever one you want, then you head through, fight to the end of that floor, and get your reward. In this sense, and in many other senses, Have a Nice Death is emulating other roguelike classics like Hades.

Each run is also very RNG-focused, as is rather standard for roguelikes, of course. Each of the floors of the Departments could have weapons, spells, or curses for you to use as part of your ever-expanding arsenal. Have a Nice Death is full of secondary attacks, in the form of weapons, with a cooldown timer, and spells, with a rapidly refilling mana bar that doesn’t seem to have much influence on how often you use it, and these secondary attacks can help you battle your way through the floors because otherwise, you’ll only have your scythe.

 

The scythe is a great weapon and it has various forms that you can unlock, such as an original God of War-style chained version, a short and fast dual sickles version, and so on. Each of these different varieties of scythes is complimented by the curses that you can unlock. Curses are not spells of any description, they’re actually just the name Have a Nice Death uses for run-based upgrades. So, as soon as you die or finish a run, the upgrades all go away. This is where the heavy RNG aspects of the game come into play as Death could get a run where there are some great upgrades and powerful secondary weapons, and other times, there’ll be nothing.

Each of the Departments is also arranged in an RNG fashion as you never know which floors you’ll be allowed to choose from at the end of each level. You may really need some health, but every floor you enter has no healing items. So, you just inch closer and closer to death until you can’t withstand it any longer. In addition, because of the procedurally generated nature of each floor in this hack and slash game, you’ll never know for sure whether a floor may have you doing a series of small fights or going into a big fight where you get locked into a space and have to battle against waves of enemies until they’re all gone. Either way, the combat manages to hold this all together extremely well because it is a fast and fluid style that allows you to whip around the screen with grace and dexterity.

Each Department also, of course, ends with a boss. Have a Nice Death has some great boss encounters, but they can be challenging. They all have their own special moves and you really need to study them to learn the best ways to avoid them. It’s quite common that the first time you face off against one of them, you’ll die because you don’t know their moves. In addition, if you haven’t managed to find some good secondary attacks by the time you reach a boss, you may have some difficulty.

 

Bosses have relatively long health bars when you’re just hitting them with the scythe, but the other attacks, like the secondary weapons and spells, can pack a much stronger punch. So, if you don’t have any, you may be screwed. Although, there is a rage-style frenzy bar that fills up the more you hack and slash your enemies and saving these room-clearing attacks for bosses and the sections where enemies gang up on you is a good way to survive.

Now, one of the issues here is that Have a Nice Death is a rather difficult game that actually gets easier the more you play. It’s essentially at its hardest in the early parts of each run because you have no real upgrades and a limited overall moveset until you’ve found a few extra items to use.  So, the game actually gets easier the further in you get rather than harder, and the real difficulty doesn’t come with beating enemies who are necessarily harder and harder, but the challenge rather comes with having the endurance to go on.

Health is a tremendously scarce resource in Have a Nice Death. The health pickups are incredibly infrequent; even when you use the equivalent of a health potion, it hardly heals you. One healing item is often not enough to stop a single attack from a bigger enemy. It’s something about the game that may put off quite a few people. There are the occasional Relaxation Rooms you can find in a Department, but these don’t often appear, and even when they do, they’ll give you a relatively small heal. So, Have a Nice Death makes itself harder by limiting health pickups, and also by refusing to heal you between runs, as a way of inflating the difficulty. There is an easy mode that you can adopt, but even that doesn’t make it that much easier, it rather just allows you to start with healing items and makes some enemies weaker.

 

So, a lack of health resources is likely what’s going to kill you in Have a Nice Death. This may frustrate some players, but there are more permanent upgrades that can be found between runs. These are also comparatively infrequently unlocked as you need to gain experience points that become increasingly stingy the higher you go in the experience levels. There is also the cash currency that is not used in runs but is instead reserved for your hub world, allowing you to buy certain new items that can appear in the world. You can also buy decorations and furniture for your hub world if you want to do that for some reason, but like Hades, it comes across as a rather pointless way to spend your money when you could be spending it on far more useful combat-oriented items.

Within each run, there are also very limited means of truly upgrading your character as there are special safe floors called Control Rooms, and these rooms allow you to adopt a run-based upgrade to your weapons and spells. These, of course, disappear when you die, but they do give you a good edge during a fight. Sadly, these rooms also tend to be infrequent. Sometimes you get access to one, but you’ll usually only gain access to the shop, and while the shop does always have a healing item to help you on your way, it won’t help you that much because even the healing items you can buy are generally pretty tiny and hardly heal you.

All of this complaining may feel like Have a Nice Death is not a recommended game, but it very much is. The gameplay is fast-paced and just fun to do, and the art style is utterly gorgeous and definitely reminiscent of something like Hollow Knight. However, the issues are something that needs to be discussed. The biggest issue is the healing aspect of the game.

 

However, it also does a rather poor job explaining some of its mechanics to you despite having a tutorial that is overly exposition-oriented to the point where it can be rather annoying. The problem with that is that Have a Nice Death is full of terms specific to the game, so you may end up needing to look up the in-game guide to remind yourself what the hell an anima is in the context of this game, but this issue does go away as you learn the game.

Furthermore, there is a special additional elevator system that can allow you to skip straight to later bosses but seeing as your character cannot really become stronger between runs, and there’s no real way to always start with a secondary weapon, it’s essentially a suicide mission to go to a boss straight away. If all you have is a scythe with no upgrades or extra weapons, then going up against a late-game boss will result in your death.

A good solution to this may be to crib from the greats. Hades opened each run by giving you an upgrade, but you only get your first regular upgrade in Have a Nice Death, and that doesn’t mean a weapon, it just means an upgrade, at the end of the first level. So, you can skip a bunch of floors and Departments, but you’re putting yourself in a dangerous position if you do so without any preparation.

 

These are all the real problems that Have a Nice Death has because this game has a great narrative presentation that runs through it as you meet little characters in your attempt to beat the big baddies who have made everything worse in the world. And you do this while murdering your way through the hordes of the underworld with a fast-paced hack and slash set of mechanics that are a ton of fun to use.

Have a Nice Death may have its problems, but it’s a great experience and one worth playing if you’re a fan of the genre. Plus, it has some of the best aesthetics in the business, and the little Death character is an adorable thing that is immensely fun to use as you destroy everything in your path. So, this game comes highly recommended despite the flaws.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed