Death and Taxes PS5 Review 8/10 “Only two things in life are certain” 💀📝 @PlaceholderGW #IndieGame #GameDev

Have you ever been envious of the Grim Reapers job? walking around with a big scythe, getting to meet a lot of interesting - before taking their souls? sounds like a great job! Sadly, just like most jobs in the modern age it’s now a desk job with lots of bureaucracy - and no big scythes.

Death and Taxes starts with you being created, a new Grim Reaper to decide the fates of us mere mortals, you are given an introduction by your new boss and told of your new duties. You are given a set of files with various information on various folks, their name, age, job etc. and then a broader description of their life, this will give you the information on which you will base your final judgment. How will you decide who lives and dies? Do you base your decision on the actions of the person? Will you decide based on age? What criteria will you use? 

This is the most engaging part of the game, you have some tough decisions and they require some serious thought, very rarely were they easy to make, I spent awhile debating which people ‘deserved’ their fate. The higher ups don’t let you alone decide who or how many to kill, every day they give you a directive - usually how many, or a certain type of person that you need to kill - for example, one day I had eight files and was told I need to kill seven of them, it was a tough choice and for the first time I had an even bigger dilemma - not just who to kill but… should I be listening to the higher ups? Should I make the decision to save all these people? Should I stick it to the top brass and make my own mind up about this? 

Well, the game has a good way of making you really question this choice, as after every day, you are forced in front of your boss for a daily briefing where you will be praised or chastised depending on what your decisions were, and at the end of the week you will be evaluated again and the decision will be made if you still have a job - and if you lose your job… you lose your life. 

On a lighter note, you get a wage every day you follow orders and can use it at a bar where you can meet other employees and learn more about the grim reaping business, or, in the basement of the building is a pirate who sells various items you can keep on your desk to interact with. My favourite was the coin, for one day I let the flip of the coin decide who lives and who dies. The other thing you can do every day is check your phone and see how your choices effected the world, were they a positive or negative? Did you make the right choices?

The game has a great look, the world is grey with pops of colour, it is visually captivating, with the various colours popping off the screen giving the world a vivid look whilst still having the grey overwhelming all. I thoroughly enjoyed the soundtrack which captures the mood wonderfully, it has a wide variety of styles - from jazz to jaunty pirate music.

The only real negative I had was that I don’t feel the story and the endings do it for me, they aren't bad, but when I got to the ending I had the feeling of… was that it? I thought we might have been building to something bigger and maybe a little different, but that may have just been my personal expectations.

SUMMARY

I enjoyed my time with Death and Taxes, it has a great visual and musical style and I love a moral dilemma, so the decision-making process was right up my street. I had a little disappointment with the endings but that alone is not enough to put this into the death pile.