Death and Taxes

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Pineapple Works)

Death and Taxes is a Graphic Adventure that plays very similarly to the game Papers, Please, with the player taking the role of a Grim Reaper and tasked by Fate (here portrayed as a bespectacled man wearing a yellow bow tie) with deciding which of the case files on your desk will live and which will die. This game was released early in 2020 on the PC, and later that same year on Nintendo Switch.

Graphically, this game features some decent hand-drawn visuals that are mostly black and white, with occasional splashes of color. There’s not really too much to see here, aside from occasionally nice character art depicting the game’s characters. This is paired with music that seemed very much like elevator music, combining with the largely colorless visuals to give the game an overall aesthetic of some sort of purgatory.

The characters in this game, few though they are, are all fully voiced, with Fate talking in a sardonic tone and with an oddly stilted cadence that reminded me heavily of G-Man from the Half-Life series, and with a skeletal merchant you trade with for nick-knacks speaking in a cartoonishly piratey manner. While the game has occasional moments of humor throughout the dialogue and even in the unusual case files themselves at times, this merchant seemed like one bright spot in an otherwise drab and dreary presentation. Having said that, I can’t necessarily fault this game for having a dry presentation – after all, this is supposed to be a version of the Grim Reaper imagined as a mundane office job.

In terms of gameplay, get ready for a lot of comparisons to Papers, Please, because that comparison is unavoidable. While this game definitely does things in a unique way, there’s no denying that the ground it treads is very similar.

In Death and Taxes (incidentally, there’s not much in the way of taxes here, it’s just alluding to the classic phrase, as well as the way this game treats death as a mundane desk job), what you’re tasked with doing isn’t especially challenging. Each in-game day you’ll be provided with a pile of profiles of those you’re tasked with sorting via ticking off boxes marked “Live” and “Die”, as well as instructions for how to mark the files for that given day. Perhaps you’ll be asked to make sure everyone with a medical background lives, or make sure at least one person under 35 dies. Usually you’ll be asked to meet some combination of requirements.

Unlike Papers, Please, there’s no time limit forcing you to rush through things here, nor are the documents particularly complex or varied. If you want to follow the rules to the letter, you’ll likely find little difficulty in doing so, although the game makes it clear that following these rules isn’t necessarily the only valid course of action – while you’ll be fired for breaking these rules too frequently, even Fate himself will question why you’re so devoted to your task if you don’t occasionally break a few rules, and the game’s story can follow multiple paths based on these choices.

Unfortunately, the mechanics of the gameplay here are unnecessarily frustrating. Your on-screen cursor moves agonizingly slow, and the game frequently forces you to move back and forth instead of making things more user-friendly. Your pay, for example, comes in the form of coins, which will constantly make annoying noises until you put them away in a desk drawer, with each and every one of them needing to be moved individually. Open a file near the edge of a screen while holding the marker pen? Well, then you need to move the cursor off to the side to drop the pen, move back to the file to slide it to where you can see the whole thing, move back to the pen to pick it up, move back to the file to mark it… ugh.

This problem is largely mitigated in handheld mode, where the game sports full touchscreen support that works very well, but here the game introduces another problem – the text here is frequently small and difficult to read. This is already a problem in docked mode on a decent-size screen, but in handheld mode, players will be forced to squint to try to make out these important details. Is that 2 people who need to die today, or 6? Kiiiiinda’ important to note that.

However, probably the biggest let-down here is that while this game copies much of the formula of Papers, Please, it doesn’t have any of that game’s emotional weight or ethical dilemmas. After deciding which of your files goes into which pile, you may see a phone text the following day giving a snippet about their death or survival, as well as the consequences it had, but something about being an otherworldly and detached force of nature, along with the often comical nature of the files you’re presented with, makes it hard to feel particularly strongly one way or another when ticking off the “Die” box. There’s nothing here that hits as hard as moments in Papers, Please where a woman begs at the border post to let her daughter into the country, or you can immediately see the impact on a man when you deny him entry due to a clerical error on his paperwork.

There’s also very little personal at stake here – do poorly on a given day, and you’ll get less money for nick-nacks at the merchant’s shop and a stern talking-to from Fate. Keep doing poorly and you’ll be fired. But you’re not weighing the fate of those you judge against a starving wife and child at home or the inescapable reality that you’re working for a despotic regime. You’re just a cog in the machine that is the complex forces that govern the universe. Heck, the “you” in this case isn’t even anyone of consequence, but the latest in a long line of Grim Reapers, apparently constructed en masse for this task.

That’s not to say there isn’t some amusement to be had in Death and Taxes. The characters are interesting, and players are enticed to replay the game multiple times to see what happens when different choices are made. However, on the whole, I just never felt particularly engaged by any of those choices, and the game’s interface issues made it difficult to enjoy the game even on a more detached level. Fans of Graphic Adventures and especially Papers, Please may still find this game to be worth a look, but definitely don’t expect anything on the same level as that game.

tl;dr – Death and Taxes is a Graphic Adventure with a similar sort of gameplay to Papers, Please, with players taking the role of a Grim Reaper tasked with sorting those who will live from those who will die. There’s a lot of potential in that premise, and the game has some interesting characters and gives players multiple paths the story can take depending on how diligently they choose to do their job, but despite the literal life and death stakes, this game never carries the same emotional weight as Papers, Please, and the frustrating interface makes it hard to keep engaged. Fans of this sort of game may want to give it a look, but it ultimately can’t step out from under the shadow of a much better game.

Grade: C-

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