Video Game Review - Death or Treat
Spooky, Scary, Skeletons…
Longtime followers of Geek Culture Reviews will know that I’m an avid fan of the roguelike genre. While I don’t claim to be any good, their simple pick up and play style allows for a more casual style of gaming away from the competitive world of ranked Overwatch 2 and Halo Infinite. When I received the email to potentially review Death or Treat - the debut title from developers Saona Studios - I jumped at the opportunity.
Now, would I become the HollowTown hero? We’ll come with me as we find out!
The main narrative of Death or Treat centres around a war for a substance known as “Candy”. You play as a friendly (but badass) ghost called Scary, who’s drafted by HollowTown’s remaining citizens to battle the evil Faceboo conglomerate from taking control of Candy and destroying the town. What follows is some less subtle jibes at social media, big corporations, and Mark Zuckerberg, as Scary battles back against “The Man” aka ‘Fackerburg’. While Death or Treat’s story may be a bit weak, it’s made up by some interesting satire, and a cast of likeable characters.
Moving on to gameplay - and aside from a few technical issues - Death or Treat performs pretty much like any other roguelike. Starting from the hub world of HollowTown you’ll attempt to guide Scary on this seemingly impossible task. In between runs you’ll be back in HollowTown either spending collected materials on rebuilding and unlocking new vendors, or upgrading Scary’s skills. Much like every other roguelike, HollowTown doesn’t particularly offer anything new and aside from it’s presentation, it’s a pretty bland place.
Speaking of presentation, the visuals are simply gorgeous. Everything has been crafted by hand, and the design team have taken the Halloween ascetics to great lengths. The muted colour palette ties into both the Halloween feel, and a feeling of dread as Faceboo churns the life out of the world. The only downside is that with the game being presented in 2D, there’s no depth perception. While the game is gorgeous, everything feels flat. Quite often I mistook an item in the background as a platform, and gleefully fell to my death. And other times I’d mistake obstacles in my path as those in the background. Even though it’s not particularly game breaking, it’s a simple thing that does break the game’s immersion, and drastically slows down its pacing.
Keeping with the presentation, and each of the games four worlds feature their own ascetics and design quirks. The DarkChat environment really stood out for me as it’s dark ominous Candy factories blotted the landscape with fabricated designs and industrial machines. It really gave off a somewhat anti Willy Wonka vibe with the vibrant chocolate factory being replaced with conveyor belts just churning out box after box. Being a roguelike also means that each worlds layout changes with each death. While boss locations naturally stay the same, there’s no telling just how each run is going to go until you start. Again, this is nothing particularly new with the genre, however with how expansive Death or Treat’s levels can be, I would of liked some sort of map system.
When it comes to combat the experience is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, most enemies feel balanced, and there’s a great degree of different mobs to fight. Scary has a few moves under his sheets such as a standard attack, double-jump, heavy attack, and one of three special moves. To an extent combat is fairly fast paced, yet it’s also held back by some odd design choices - the other hand. One glaring issue is that performing another action will only work once Scary has returned to its idle state. This means that if you suddenly need to avoid an enemies attack while in mid swing of your own weapon - the animation won’t register the sudden change in move. As such it slows the combat down by a considerable degree and makes fighting groups of enemies pretty much suicide. This is also further reinforced by the dodge ability not granting any use as a form of defence. If anything it’s just a tool that allows you to move faster.
The issues don’t rest here either as health regeneration is another thorn. To regenerate health you’ll either have to pick up items, or defeat enemies. Sounds simple enough. Yet in practice the game doesn’t show you if you’re healing, or even what your health bar is. While you do have a hud, there’s no on-screen presence to show what’s going on with your health other than when you take damage.
With any roguelike, the gameplay loop has to be rewarding to keep you invested in the repetitive nature of the game. Where Death or Treat does implement its version of “eat, sleep, die, repeat”, it’s also some how penalises those of us who have a degree of skill. When you die, to begin with you’re able to select up to five gathered materials to take back to the hub with you. These materials act as the means to rebuild HollowTown, and purchase upgrades for Scary. As you progress in both the game and the skill tree, the required materials become greater - and you’ll find that you’ll need materials only found in the later stages. The problem here is that being limited to only bringing back five materials stunts and form or progress. If you do get far in your first run, it’s pretty null in void as the materials you could save are useless. What I’ve found is that I ended up analysing what items I needed and played until that point to then die. As you unlock inventory space, this does become less of a problem, yet when games such as Hades, and Dead Cells reward you for inching that little bit further, here it feels counter intuitive.
All in all, Death or Treat sits firmly in the middle of the roguelike spectrum. Where it’s story and presentation are arguably its highest points. The general gameplay loop, and combat does leave a lot to be desired. As debut titles go, Sarona Studios have shown the potential to craft something incredible, and Death or Treat has certainly sown those seeds. However, right now, Death or Treat is hard to recommend over the genre’s big guns.
Rating: 5/10
A code was kindly provided for this review.
Death or Treat is available now and can be purchased on PC (version reviewed), Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5
Rob Lake - For more comic book and video game chat why not follow us on Twitter/Facebook @GeekCultureRev, and TikTok/YouTube @Geekculturereviews.
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