Death and Taxes

this game is good and funny, but gets really boring when you are hunting all the achievements

Simple but fun, intriguing story and plenty of replayability.

Fun short game with a lot replayability

This is where the binary nature of Steam reviews really get me. For me personally, this game is incredibly okay for your first play through. But it quickly becomes hell when you're trying to get all the achievements.

The gameplay gets tedious and stale very quickly. Adding to the fact that it took me close to 15 play throughs to get all the achievements. Nitpicking every detail and having to count and make sure all the world parameters while remembering the other stuff that you have to do outside of stamping was just torture at times. Don't even get me started on some of the achievements that require a lot of luck and are very vague, forcing you to do another play through just because you messed it up somehow.

What saddens me is these achievements were made consciously. I mean it's fine if most of the niche, repetitive and annoying things that you have to do are just Easter eggs. But all the achievements are just so unfriendly to achievement hunters, especially for myself who can't stand moving on to the next game if I haven't completed every single achievement in my current game.

Despite all that, I just can't bring myself to give this game a negative review. I'd rate this a 6/10 or 7/10 easily, but the binary nature of this review leaves me no option but to recommend this game.

The sound design is very good, the music is really nice to hear and doesn't get old. The writing is passable, with the character design being somewhat thoughtful but a lot of the times the characters aren't that necessary. The interaction with Fate and getting to know his motivations are deep enough to make things matter. Mortimer is an interesting character. The character customization options are very good.

But the one thing that guides my hand to recommend this game is the passion from the developers. No matter how tired and fed up I am when hunting the achievements, when those credits roll in and you get to know more about the developers, you can just feel the care, love and passion brought into this game. The sense of humor shines through and felt like home. When everything was said and done, I felt a huge wave of relief, but I didn't feel any regret getting this game.

If you're not an achievement hunter, I urge you to please get this game. If you are, I'd still do but get your patience ready cause you're going to need it.

so we're all thirsting over Fate right



(great game, cozy n fun, play it)

*sees Fate* *jaw drops to floor, eyes pop out of sockets accompanied by trumpets, heart beats out of chest, AWOOOOOOOGA sound effect, pulls chain on train whistle that has appeared next to head as steam blows out, slams fists on table, rattling any plates, bowls or silverware, whistles loudly, fireworks shoot from top of head, pants loudly as tongue hangs out of mouth, wipes comically large bead of sweat from forehead, clears throat, straightens tie, combs hair* "Ahem, you look very lovely, boss."

I have loved this game ever since I first saw it. Just like with Papers Please I could easily spend hours on it.

You'll notice I haven't though.

That's because, while I love the story and the innumerable possibilities, I really just want an endless mode; the opportunity to try out more gadgets without having to restart, and I want to make more judgements.

There's been thoughts of creating an endless mode since 2020, but I fear those musings have been forgotten on a shelf somewhere while the devs work on other games, expanding the available platforms and adding more language options. They are working hard and I applaud that.

I just really wish I could sit down and hyperfocus on an endless mode...

Came for the cool art, stayed for the surprisingly moving storyline. Get in loser, we're overthrowing the hegemonic cycle of life and death.

I just played the 5 Days so far, and must say, I LOVE the concept. The music is on point, you really feel the choices you do impact the World, what makes you overthink you choices, and your behavior. I also buyed the Game during Spring sale for 1,79€, and can only say, get the game when you can, but I think even without the Discount, the game is worth every single penny.

I freaking love Death and Taxes. It's deceptively deep and definitely worth a few replays, along with just being a fun time. The other reviews can probably go into more depth, I just had to throw here that I love the game and think it's definitely worth the money, honestly even at full price (though I'm sure sales aren't rare at this point).

a fun and quick game to play. And replayability is there if you want to try and get the various ending types.

Chill game. I feel like a grim reaper and I love the clothing choices. It's so chill and fun to play!

cannot in good conscience recommend this to others. the dialogue and humour was quite a drag, and the philosophical aspect was quite pretentious. there were a lot of characters/dialogue that didn't matter or plot points that just did not go anywhere. loved the demo, but not sure how the full game ended up so boring, and way too tedious to play NG+ for a different ending since you have to click through it all again.

Death and Taxes is a desk job where you take on the role of a grim reaper, and your choices definitely matter. In fact, your choices can affect the ending to the game in multiple different ways, so with the multiple games, and game time lasting around roughly 2ish hours, the game is easily re-playable- and even enjoyable to replay. Will you play by fate's rules, or will you disobey? Humanity is definitely in your hands!
If you enjoyed games like the OG "Papers, Please!" I highly recommend you check this one out. You play as a grim reaper and you have a quota to meet every single day! You have to choose the right amount of people every day after reading their profiles. You mark which ones you want to spare, and which ones you want to kill. Once you place the mark, you can't erase it unless you have the magic eraser thingy which you have to buy with coins! (Because yes, this is a real job and you get paid every day for killing people.)

Not only do you have a desk, you have a phone and several other trinkets. After each passing day, sometimes you will see the news of who you killed pop up on your phone. On the weekends, you can spend time in the bar drinking with other reapers and listening to their stories. There's also a cool shop where you can use your hard earned coins to buy little fidgets and trinkets for your desk, to make desk job life a little less boring!

First, I personally owned this game on my Switch and purchased it for PC because I've played through multiple times, and as I mentioned above, it takes around 2 hours to beat. I really like this game. I do not know why, but it is fun because you need to make sure you are reading everything and being careful to make what you think are the right decisions based off of whether you want to bend the rules by having morals, devise a plan to destroy the planet, follow the rules to a T, OR defy "fate" in your own special way. Just be careful not to get fired ;)

Feels like an actual job, where is the fun in that?

8 out of 10 - Great writing and premise. One of the most original games I've played for sure. However, the pacing grained on me a little bit, as I tried to beat it in one sitting. This is a game best played in small doses, as it can truly seem to feel like a job to get through, ironically enough. I also wish the options for customization affected the gameplay or aesthetics in a more substantial way. Overall, I highly recommend this if you can get it on sale for 10 bucks or less.

It's just fun. The jokes are corny and wonderful. The game play is interesting and varied enough that even though it is the same process, it doesn't get tedious.

It's a lukewarm recommend. Get it on sale. It's a very cute and charming game that takes the Papers, Please concept and does its own thing with it in a way that feels fresh. The art style is lovely, and I really enjoyed the music. The charm, however, wore off when the NPCs' comments to me stopped aligning with what I was actually doing. I was ignoring instructions left and right, but I was told I was a model rule follower. That really took out the weight of disobeying and made me feel like not much matters.

It's a nice little game but a quick play with zero replay value to its name. A good sale purchase.

This game is wonderfully written, phenomenial voice acting, especially from Fate and Cerii, the barkeeper. It's made me start thinking about where I am in life, and I am unsure if that's a good or bad thing, lol. Worth the money, and worth the time, it's a charming lil' thing :3

Au Revoir, lil Reaper

When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade, but don't give them back.
Use them as an ingredient for brewing up spooky scary skeletons to work for your work place that could also potentialy "remove" the humanity from earth.

I accidentaly killed everyone in my first and currently only playthrough. Whoops. Anyway a nice enough little game just be VERY careful about who you trust

amazing game, even whiles i was spoiled on the basic game play from youtube i still thoroughly enjoyed it, the characters are well written despite how little time you spend with most of them

all in all it is a short 10/10 game that that is well worth it, especially if you get it on sale (i personally got it for under £2 with the, as of writing this review, current sale)


thank you devs, this game was amazing

Very fun Papers Please-esc game. Great humor, lovely art, attention to detail and decent replayability. I would highly recommend.

Game have more depth than i was expecting. Dev put actual effort and thought into it which led me having quite a bit of fun. Super recommended for a price,

I enjoyed this. theres an element of dress up, you can light things aflame, you can save the world you can be a squid head guy. you can scribble cause problems, solve issues, and drink milk! a delightful little game! played through twice in one sitting just to see how different choices impact the game!

Great game! If not grinding for achievements, you can easilly beat it in a couple of hours. I liked the humour, the artstyle, the whole thing.

It is fun to play this game over and over again!
I have the objective to get all the achievements, but the story is funny and I really recommend this one!

Very good. Great voice acting and story.

i don't know what it is about Estonia but it seems like the only games with great writing come from that country. this is one of them

with 30 different endings, it doesn't feel as monotonous as I thought it would. Definitely entertaining and I love how each choice has a consequence! Can't wait to continue and try to unlock more endings

Charming game with funny jokes every so often. Sometimes, it'll even make you question your own existence.. Or maybe that was just me. My only complaint is that I finished the game in 6 hours. I suppose there's only so much exposition you can put in a game that has you do the same thing each time

very fun, definitely challenges your brain and decision making skills,definitely worth it!

At first, I thought this was going to be a very bare bones game due to its looks and description however the more i played the more i discovered than its more than paper marking game.
There is some depth to the story, after all you are a Grim reaper that is made by a man called Fate and your job is to either balance the world or send it into chaos as everyday that you clock into work you need to follow a set amount of rules to determine who to kill and who to live and after work you get to go the Den and interact with the characters of many departments that control the fate of many things in the world.

Overall, I would play this game again just to figure out the different plot options and dialog but overall an enjoyable experience.

8/10.

This game felt like a casual "Papers, Please" game, and found it just wasn't for me.
You are a newly birthed "Death" who chooses who lives and who dies based on certain "criteria". At first, I enjoyed it. Solving the puzzle of "do not kill people in the service industry!" was interesting. And receiving the recent news to see how my choices impacted the world was, in a way, having my choices matter.
However, two things turned me off of the game after only an hour in:
- The money collected for a job well done was, for the time I played, useful for cosmetics only. I wanted items useful for my job, or a way to further my character's goals, not a hat or a snow globe.
- The "choices" I was making had news reports but my character wasn't interacting with the world. He could've been in a space ship or operating on a different planet for the amount of impact the character was seeing.

Although I deduced that the point wasn't to get "a job well done" but to spare people who I believed could save the world, I found myself unwilling to undertake that task. Why? Well, I knew the reward for making my boss unhappy would be better text in the newspaper and possibly bluer skies outside my building's window. I might be wrong but I really don't care to find out.

It’s all fun and games until your boss yells at you for not killing enough people

Got fired, resurrected, fired again, resurrected, gave a cat a stuffed animal, heard the pain of the stuffed toy & ignored it, fired once more, resurrected, beat the game, died. 10/10.

Really enjoyable story and artwork for the game

The story gets uncovered further through every playthrough if you really focus. Use the tools you're given, every single choice you make MATTERS,

Overall, it's incredibly fun. I love it.

This was a great experience. It was funny. I just think it was too short. I liked a lot of the environment and NPCs.

Papers pls but in hell. The lines are funny, and the characters have personality.
Best part is, you can squiggle on the faces :D

The gameplay is mostly boring and linear paperwork. "Papers, Please" was also a paperwork type game, but it wasn't boring, and in fact very engaging. There was simply a lot more going on with "Papers, Please," and your actions as an apparatchik in the greater system felt meaningful and impactful. Sure, you make decisions here as to who lives and who dies, but you must follow stringent rules that seem arbitrary and are never explained (WHY must I let people who are engineers perish, for example?), and are just told to "do it or else," whereas in "Papers, Please," the rationale for disallowing entry into Arstotzka is explainable or already self-evident.

Another beef I have with the game is that the game itself punishes you with the "bad ending" if you endeavor to follow all the rules set forth by your boss. In "Papers, Please," if you do so, you are rewarded with what is (arguably) the best ending in the game, even though the game itself encourages you to rebel and escape Arstotzka. So no, I do not appreciate games that give you parameters for success, and then seek to punish you for adhering to those parameters.

The fact that the devs thought it was a great idea to confuse and confound the player by getting rid of gendered language, instead referring to everyone as "they/them" is enough to halt the flow and natural rhythm of the game for the sake of what I guess was an agenda pushed by the devs, which I also do not appreciate. I paid you money so I can forget politics and the hard reality of life for an hour or two, not to be lectured further why I should care about your political viewpoints. I would not have such a problem with this if the game was listed "LGBTQ+" or some other tag that signalled to me that I should avoid it unless I agree with its political overtones, but the fact is that I bought this game expecting to play as Death, but instead was punished by having to listen to more woke crap that I disagree with on a fundamental level. It is insulting that my language has to be altered by the devs in such a blatant, impossible to ignore way that affects everything else in the game.

No, this game is trash, and a complete waste of time and money.

This game sucks so much ass it should catch buccal herpes. The narrative is not engaging at all, the repetitiveness of it all is downright disgusting. Game designers of this game should be tortured in limbo for centuries. It's not even funny how this game is boring. This is so bad. Not in a "so bad it's good" kind of way; just in a so bad it's disgusting kind of way. People involved in this project deserve a slow an painful death. I want my money back. This pretentious turd is monumentally bad.

Bought Death and Taxes ages ago, and got around to playing it only recently.

A shame I slept on it for so long. Don't be like me! It's good, seriously.

Like a more causal Papers Please with super appealing art, lots of easter eggs and references, really good writing, and amazing English voice acting.

Oh, and... 👉👈 The boss (Fate) is super hot, and in one interaction you can choose *moan* at his praise. Wtf, that's based. What's not to love??

Unless you're one of those people who call any amount of text in a game "yapping". Then you'll have a hard time. Not the good kind.

100%-ing the achievents is also a chore, from what I've heard. But that's being a completionist for ya. All about that suffering, pain, death and taxes.

very fun game, very short. I got two endings in about 9ish hours (left the game open to do something, so my hours may not be reflective of the true amount it took). I loved the art, the dialogue is very good, but gets repetitive after a playthrough or 2 so I'm glad you have the option to skip out on things you've already heard.

What this game desperately needs is a manual save function, where you can save at the start of each day. Yes, that would render the "Eraser" tool obsolete, but I reckon it's a necessary sacrifice to avoid run-ruining mistakes. An alternative option would be to have the ability to run to the shop and buy an eraser for a higher cost if you forgot it one day.

One event triggered me greatly in my playthrough and it's a major reason why I'm leaving a negative review. During my attempt to get the "EGG" achievement, I found an extremely rare profile in the game (Kharen.) As I completed the event (spoiler) It told me to kill all of the devs, and I did so, resulting in the end of my run, and me losing that valuable profile.

There was no continue, no nothing. Just a massive f*** you basically and I had to go on for 7-9 hours to find her again. I mean it's absolutely ridiculous to sucker-punch us like that, like did you not consider the implications or the possible situations before going in this direction? Not only that, but the final mission to get the "Posthumous Spiritualism" achievement requires you to get 4 or so questions right...

Luckily there's plenty of guides to go off of, but for the people that didn't have any or had to make their own, Do you not realise how fkn atrocious it is to include a low RNG event and then a pop quiz which I assume you can fail?

God man, the dev's are a bunch of a***h****.

Also, there was a 🚬 profile, so if I could do a double negative review, I would.

Pro: The game is visually stunning. It uses the art style and atmosphere of the movie Sin City. It's quite beautiful.

Cons: Everything else. The game play is boring. It's fun for maybe five minutes and then you realized that's all there is.

This game seems to be for people who need affirmation in things in the realm of gender ideology. It goes out of it's way to draw your attention to it. (Seriously, the game spends almost more time on that than anything else.) It literally adds nothing of value to the game. On one hand, it uses clear indication of gender- a female body with a female name. A male body with a male name. Then, takes the time to say that gender doesn't exist in death. That would make sense if they were spirits without male or female attributes. It also takes the time to tell you stories that involve gender ambiguous relationships. What game developers don't get about the non-progressive gamer base- if you would just put it in the game naturally, no one would care. But, when you make it a huge deal- it's just obnoxious. There are ways to insert this stuff without coming across as desperate to do so. This game came across as desperate.

Just death, no taxes. This got recommended to me due to its "similarities" with Papers, Please, but the game is vastly different. The only real similarity is that it challenges your ideals and morals.

I commend all the voice actors, Cerri's is my favorite! I like the game's art style and I LOVE the humor. LOL

First blind playthrough, I sided with Fate, but I destroyed the world within a month. :V

Replayability wise, I'm only up to NG+1. This time, I went with my gut feeling and ended the month with the world as a utopia. :V Playing NG+ with the same narrative but with different verdict feels tedious and repetitive. It also becomes easier to decide who deserves death, the profiles become less confusing when the world is in a good state. At this point, I'm too lazy to perfect the achievements. I feel like getting all the endings feel pointless since there's not enough weight to them.

Bought this on sale. was having fun. guy told me im too much of a suck up, that i shouldnt be so obedient (i wanst even doign as he requested to begin with but ok). then, when i try and be disobedient the game ends and he tells me im an idiot for not being able to follow instructions.

like, what the hell do you want from me dude.

literally havent played it since. i wouldnt reccomend.

would work better in a a more efficient interface ala Reigns

I was hoping for so much more -- witty dialogue, great voice acting, replayability. They're not quite here.

A relaxing experience.
As others pointed out, it does feel a bit like softcore "Papers, Please!" No timer for you to be stressed about, just rules and morals guiding your pen on your new desk job as the Grim Reaper #17.
The music is nice, the characters are moderately entertaining, and it even has some decent replayability.
The game is good.