Death and Taxes!

Death and Taxes… sounds like the two things definitely unavoidable for every single person in the world, right?

Just like actual death (and sadly taxes), this game was unavoidable for me! I stumbled upon the demo for Death and Taxes by accident as I scrolled through Steam to search for games on sale back in March 2024, which was basically the peak of my unemployment (…was it to avoid taxes?).

I tried the demo out and really couldn’t resist getting the full game, playing it right there and then, since it felt like I had alllll the free time in the world anyway. I got to the end with a total of just five hours within a couple of days. That short time felt contemplative and impactful.

Developed by Placeholder Gameworks, Death and Taxes leaves you undead… kind of? You’re not a zombie. I promise this is not a zombie game. When you die, instead of peacefully going into the light, you enter corporate hell (for some of you, once again) to become the Grim Reaper!! You face your boss, Fate personified, and his odd little cat (which I can’t help but adore!), and get tasked with choosing who lives and dies… every… single… day!

Every morning you look into the mirror and as your days go by, you get new ways to customise your look (occasionally having to buy new customisation stuff from the skeletal pirate you meet in the basement). You can look silly and mystical, or you can look scary. I sometimes switch between both, but this is my go-to look!

The words magical and street punk don’t usually go together, but somehow it works?

Anyway, you’re playing as the Grim Reaper. You are situated at your desk and get to choose from several handouts, each one filled with details of different people and how they’ve lived their lives, and sometimes you get instructions on how many should live and how many should die. Your boss scolds you if you don’t follow those instructions, but you can essentially decide for yourself what you want to do. You can be a reaper who kills everyone, who lets everyone live, etc.

So with all this life and death picking and choosing, you kind of can’t help but feel like you’re… playing god? They both start with a G, so maybe we’re made to feel like they share a similarity.

We end every day talking to our boss, who often asks how we feel about our job, and this is where you get to cement what kind of reaper you want to be, impacting the state of the world (plus the ending of the game, idk which matters to you more). Every choice we make matters.

If you’re like me and feel everything so deeply, no matter fact or fiction, this game can get pretty existential. You’re no longer human, but you can still choose to “live” like you are. You can feel compassion for some of the people who can’t survive because you want to adhere to your boss’s instructions and no longer have “live” slots. You can feel livid as you read the profiles of awful, awful people.

You can also choose not to care. You can actually choose to reallyyyyy not care. Aside from the handouts, you get a phone with very dead-bird-app-like features that buzzes each time you start a new day. The feature lets you see what’s happened on Earth as a direct impact of your decisions as the reaper.

You can check your phone, but you don’t really have to. If you do, you may regret some of the decisions you’ve made, but if you don’t, you’ve chosen not to know what you’ve made happen.

It’s pretty much like life, right? We make mistakes that impact other people around us. We get to choose to realise what we’ve done, maybe take some accountability, or we get to ignore what we’ve done, because, a lot of the time, that’s much easier for us. Might not be the best thing, though.

So, if you want to play god/grim or you’re looking to feel existential about something other than your own life for a change, Death and Taxes is worth exploring!

xo Reiko