Peace, Death! 2

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Peace, Death! 2, like its predecessor, is an Arcade-style game where players take the role of a grim reaper tasked with sorting souls to determine who should be sent to heaven, hell, or purgatory. This game was released on PC in 2021 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022.

The presentation in this game is a bit more involved than in the first game, but features the same basic style, with 2D pixel art characters and backgrounds. In between stages you’ll have the opportunity to interact with various characters in this afterlife-realm, some performing various simple activities, which does a decent job of making this feel more like a lived-in (ha) space, but it’s nothing overly elaborate. And once again, the music here is bland and forgettable.

While Peace, Death! 2 retains the same basic concept of the first game, the way players go about it is different this time. Rather than being shown people one at a time and giving each of them a virtual once-over to see where they belong, now players have six characters to judge at any given time, and are told to select any one of them that should be sent to the designated place based on criteria you’ve been given.

These criteria start fairly simple – angels go to heaven, demons go to hell. But gradually more rules start getting added to the mix. Humans and minotaurs are neutral, and by default they go to purgatory. However, characters can have “good” or “bad” symbols that can change their balance to push them towards heaven or hell. However, angels, demons, and minotaurs (the latter being from purgatory) can always be sent to their natural home if you don’t want to bother adding up their symbols.

I like this system much better than the first game, because there’s not necessarily just one right or wrong answer, and players have some degree of freedom to choose who to send to a given place. For example, you may opt to refrain from sending on an angel, demon, or minotaur because they’re more flexible about where they can go. Later on, you may have additional optional goals you can aim for to earn more money and favor with the various factions of the underworld, and having this added flexibility can help you to achieve these goals.

I do think that a lot of the busywork in-between stages seems somewhat pointless, and the core gameplay itself is still somewhat simple. But overall this is definitely an improvement over the first game.

Peace, Death! 2 is still a pretty simple game about sorting humans based on various criteria, and once again it doesn’t even try to reach for the same sort of dramatic storytelling seen in Papers, Please but it is nevertheless a decent distraction that’s a marked improvement over the first game. It’s still not a game I would actively seek out, and i can’t imagine many finding this game to be engaging for more than a short play session, but if the game’s theme amuses you, you might find it to be worth trying.

tl;dr – Peace, Death! 2, like the first game, is an Arcade-style game where players must decide whether the people they’re sorting are headed for heaven or hell. The gameplay here is simple, but becomes more complex over time as you get a growing list of criteria. The changes made to the gameplay this time around do make for a marked improvement over the first game, though it’s still a somewhat shallow experience that’s not especially compelling beyond short play sessions.

Grade: C+

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