Have A Nice Death Review: More Hollow Than Hollow Knight, More Dead Than Dead Cells

Have A Nice Death has incredible style and combat, but it never does enough to separate itself from the roguelike pack.

Have a Nice Death proves that a collection of great ideas do not make a great game. It plays like the greatest hits of every popular roguelike and 2D action-platformer of the past decade. It has the precision combat and boss complexity of Hollow Knight, the progression and weapon variety of Dead Cells, the evolving narrative of Hades, and even some of the surprises that make The Binding of Isaac endlessly replayable. Yet somehow, Have a Nice Death can't manage to be greater than, or even as good as, the sum of its parts. For all of the great ideas it borrows, it doesn't have many new ones of its own.

Far and away, Have a Nice Death's standout feature is its art style. The way Magic Design Studios uses foreground and background elements creates a wonderful sense of depth to every environment, and the contrast between monochromatic spaces and vibrantly colored attacks makes combat flashy and fun to watch. Every attack and enemy is incredibly detailed and expressive, giving it a hand-dawn, saturday morning cartoon quality. The tone is grim-cute just like Cult of the Lamb, but Have a Nice Death is definitely doing its own thing visually.

Unfortunately, the level design can't support the quality of the artwork and animations. Have a Nice Death's procedurally generated worlds have elements of Dead Cells’ maze-like construction, but the levels are largely made up of disconnected floating platforms that don't give any real sense of flow or intentional use of space. As you ascend from floor to floor through Death Inc. you’re able to choose what type of upgrade you want next - weapons, healing items, passive bonuses called Curses, currency for upgrades - but since the prizes always show up right before the next elevator, there's not much incentive to explore. There's typically five or six floors you need to pass through before you reach that world's boss, which quickly starts to feel like a chore after just a few runs.

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The bosses are real bastards. All of them have at least half a dozen attack patterns to learn, and once they reach half health they swap to a second phase of even more devastating attacks. Learning how to avoid attacks and building skills to counter each boss should be a satisfying journey, but the structure of Have a Nice Death makes it extraordinarily punishing.

Normally I would celebrate these kinds of complex boss fights that require precise timing, but Have a Nice Death doesn't give you enough opportunities to learn these fights without forcing you to slog through level after level of trivial content before you make it back to them. You can only take a few hits from a boss before you’re sent back to the start of the game, which makes learning how to avoid all of their attacks frustratingly difficult, especially since their patterns change halfway through the fight.

Bosses are also completely different from all the other combat encounters in the game. While traversing through each level, you’re incentivized to blitz every enemy, firing off all of your cooldowns and dumping your mana to kill them as quickly as possible. Your weapons have a stun built into your combo, so the best strategy is always to unleash your full suite of attacks as quickly as possible to kill each enemy before they can fight back. This isn't the case in boss encounters, which require you to be patient, wait for openings, and learn how to dodge attacks. The gameplay disparity between the relatively dull levels and the extremely challenging boss fight makes Have a Nice Death feel woefully out of balance.

Every death offers opportunities to progress, however. You can use currency earned during your run to unlock new spells and weapons, and it has a clever system that provides discounts to those unlockables for completing challenges. I appreciate systems like this because they reward skill and time investment equally so that anyone can accomplish their goals, and the progressive nature of the discount system means you have a lot of choice about when you decide to invest in new abilities. Those abilities add some nice variety to combat, but they’re not enough to make up for how dull re-traversing the same flat environments is every time a boss smacks you down in three hits.

There are a few narrative threads that evolve over time as you play, to help make restarting feel less repetitive. But while Hades endeared you to each of its characters by developing their personalities and teaching you about their motivations between each run, Have a Nice Death is laser focused on committing to its bit. You play as Death, who has become physically diminished by burnout, and now seeks to recover by kicking the butts of overzealous and out-of-line employees. Across each loop Death has to deal with nagging interns, union reps, and the health and safety inspector. The banality of bureaucracy has sapped Death's passion for reaping, and the game narrative plays on that theme to the point of exhaustion. Every joke can be boiled down to a spooky twist on corporate culture. Magic Design Studios wanted to make a game about monotony but ended up making a monotonous game.

Despite my frustration with the core loop, I’ve played Have a Nice Death a lot longer than I expected. I’ve waited a long time to find a platformer with the kind of precise combat that Hollow Knight offers, and despite its flaws, this has the best combat feel of any side scroller I’ve played since 2017. There are countless combinations of weapons, spells, and cloaks to experiment with and find your preferred playstyle, and each run gives you another opportunity to try out a new combination. I found a lot of success with the long range Diss Scythe - a classic scythe on the end of a rope that can be thrown at enemies - and the Bees, which seek out targets so you can stay at a safe distance. I have 40 abilities now and I still have nearly as many to unlock, which is the only thing motivating me to keep smashing my face into the same three bosses over and over.

Have a Nice Death has a lot more depth than a lot of roguelikes, and on scope and budget alone it does stand out. It's both visually striking and mechanically tight, but if you’re the kind of player that only dips into the genre for the exceptional titles - the Dead Cells, Hades, and Spelunkies of the world - Have a Nice Death might be a little too derivative to leave a strong impression. This is a roguelike-lovers roguelike. If you’ve already escaped the Underworld as Zagreus and freed the Hollownest from the control of the Radiance, Have a Nice Death is a worthwhile next stop.

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Eric Switzer is Features Editor that specializes in Pokemon, VR, and tech coverage. He is also the host of TheGamer Podcast, now entering its second year. Eric loves board games, fan conventions, new technology, and his sweet sweet kitties Bruce and Babs. Favorite games include Destiny 2, Kingdom Hearts, Super Metroid, and Prey...but mostly Prey. His favorite Pokémon is Umbreon.