Have a Nice Death is like The Office like a sick roguelike

Upcoming Early Access on Steam game Have a happy death not just a lifelike action game starring the god of death. It’s a workplace comedy inspired by Office.

In this new indie game from Unruly hero developer Magic Design Studios, the player controls an incarnation of the God of Death, who has lost his job as CEO of Death Incorporated. It turns out that the underworld is run by a lousy corporation who destroys the lives of its employees just as much as those on mortal planes. Overworked and underrated, players follow the Sorrows, who run Death Inc. ignore their mission to cause chaos on Earth. Death has to show them who the boss is and can make their work a little more interesting.

In reality, Have a happy death is a side-scrolling action that takes place in various divisions of Death Inc., including addiction, pollution, and more. This game will grab the player’s attention thanks to its fantastic and flamboyant animations, but has the potential to become more relevant on a deeper level thanks to its setting and themes.

Gamifying burnout

Visualizing the underworld is not a new concept in the game – Door of death and Hades both take a similar approach to depicting the afterlife – but the developers of Have fun Dead made it clear that this is more of a game about workplace struggles and burnout than death. Death can’t really die. To him, RIP really means “a break from the paperwork.”

To realize this vision, the developers at Magic Design Studios had to learn from their own experience and hope players will too. Narrative designer Mérédith Alfroy told Digital Trends: “We started thinking about our own experiences as employees in corporations. “Everybody knows how it works, so we can assume players will understand what we mean.”

Discussing the realities of the modern workplace can obviously be quite daunting, but there’s one show that’s known for tackling these topics in a humorous and accessible way: Office.

“We are especially fond of Office US TV show,” said Alfroy. “We definitely wanted to go in the direction of the show with humour.”

At the basic level, Office is a show about feeling stuck in a deadlocked job at an unimportant company, but it captivates the audience by exploiting humor from all the quirky relationships that emerge from that hardship.

When Have a happy deathThe premise of can be frustratingly related, its developers are learning from Office and create something that would make the nonstop work a little bit more bearable. The main way it can do that is to make players feel powerful as they battle the Sorrows and their minions around Death Inc. Have a happy deathThe game’s battles look exhilarating, and the game is intentionally designed to be short but sweet.

Simon Dutertre, lead game designer, explains: “We focused on creating an action game, and the roguelike genre really aligns with our vision of creating fast action series. and short in an hour run,” explains Simon Dutertre, lead game designer.

Why early access?

American version of Office had to recover from a first season which is not so common and is much lower in tone. Thankfully, its creators focused on elements that people liked, such as Michael Scott’s lovable antics and Jim and Pam’s romance, and the show was a hit. during season two. With Have a happy deathMagic Design Studios has a clear vision of what they want to do, but is also looking for player feedback through early access to really give players what they want.

“We knew where we wanted to end the story of this game, but we really wanted to surprise players with the events of the game,” Alfroy said. “We were also able to use feedback from the community during our visit and could dive deeper into the short stories of some of the NPCs or even go deeper with the main one. We wanted to adapt to the responses, even when we knew where we were going in the main story and wanted to surprise the players.”

Death drinks coffee in Have a Nice Death.

This feedback will also be of value to our game Have a happy death. It also looks fluid and satisfying, but Dutertre anticipates having to tweak the balance and ensure that no two runs are the same. He said: “I want to avoid letting the players have similar runs. “We have certain enemies and weapons, and we want to see if that’s enough.”

Have a happy death hope to make the most of this release format and deliver a fun yet pleasant human-like experience that players will talk about as much as they do with Dead cells or Hades. Have a happy death will be released in Steam Early Access on March 8, 2022.