Death and Taxes... tries very hard. All the set dressing here is good or better. The world and lore are mysterious, interesting and well-realised. The characters are very well written; the way they are written and presented reminded me of Hades, and I don't give out positive comparisons to Supergiant games lightly. The game can progress in honestly pretty different ways depending on player choice, meaning you feel you have agency in the world, and each of these branches are stuffed full of a commendable amount of fully-voiced dialogue. And the music is great, the art style is decent, etc etc. Basically, everything about this game's aesthetic, tone and context is pretty great. But the core game underlying it all? Eh...
So I see this getting compared a lot to Papers Please and sure, I get the similarity, they are both desktop document checking simulators after all. But I don't think the comparison is very fair... on Papers Please. The time limit on each day in Papers Please adds some tension, difficulty and need to strategize and 'git gud'... none of this is in Death and Taxes. In Papers Please you need to perform well to get money to feed your family, giving some stakes to doing a good job; in Death and Taxes you also get bonus money for following the rules, but... you don't really need it for anything. Sure you have the stakes of the world going to crap in the background, but... well...
In Papers Please, success is obvious and well-defined. You can either follow your instructions to the letter, maximising your profit, or you can deliberately make small mistakes to help a few people along the way. Working out the definition of a 'good job' in Death and Taxes is an absolute shit show. First playthrough I just followed the instructions given to me verbatim until a character appeared suggesting ways i could rebel. I then followed that character verbatim to the end of the game, everything went completely to shit and a number of characters started berating me for deliberately ruining everything. And I won't lie, this pissed me off, because I had just being doing exactly what it felt like the game was telling me to do to get a good ending. But it pretty heavily prompted me to do a playthrough 2, at which point I got given a tool which told me that this whole time I was supposed to be balancing the status of 4 different parameters in the world (health, economy, etc). And I guess I was just supposed to know this was a secret objective, as well as correctly guess exactly which esoteric things I was supposed to be balancing.
But even with this newfound knowledge, it was a game of total guesswork. For example, I could be presented with a banker, and be pretty sure that killing them would have some effect on the 'economy' stat. But it honestly seemed to be a 50/50 shot as to whether that effect would be positive of negative, and had very little to do with anything written in their profile. I did manage to eke out a victory in playthrough 2, but I never felt like things were under control, and when things started getting bad it never felt like it was my fault. Honestly, it's just quite an unpleasant experience to try and win a game where you are told neither the rules nor the objective. I honestly think that Death and Taxes would have been better off stripping the core gameplay entirely and just resigning to be purely a visual novel.
So yeah. Despite an admittedly heavy dose of charm and intrigue in the writing and presentation, the core game in D&T was so flawed that it just couldn't quite win me over in the end. There is a spark of magic here, some 'greater than the sum of its parts' experience, and it has had me playing and thinking about it for longer than it has any right to, so it must be doing something right. It does definitely get better the more time you give it. But despite this, and in spite of having some of the best-written characters from any game I've played this year, I still don't really know whether I can recommend this one.
So I see this getting compared a lot to Papers Please and sure, I get the similarity, they are both desktop document checking simulators after all. But I don't think the comparison is very fair... on Papers Please. The time limit on each day in Papers Please adds some tension, difficulty and need to strategize and 'git gud'... none of this is in Death and Taxes. In Papers Please you need to perform well to get money to feed your family, giving some stakes to doing a good job; in Death and Taxes you also get bonus money for following the rules, but... you don't really need it for anything. Sure you have the stakes of the world going to crap in the background, but... well...
In Papers Please, success is obvious and well-defined. You can either follow your instructions to the letter, maximising your profit, or you can deliberately make small mistakes to help a few people along the way. Working out the definition of a 'good job' in Death and Taxes is an absolute shit show. First playthrough I just followed the instructions given to me verbatim until a character appeared suggesting ways i could rebel. I then followed that character verbatim to the end of the game, everything went completely to shit and a number of characters started berating me for deliberately ruining everything. And I won't lie, this pissed me off, because I had just being doing exactly what it felt like the game was telling me to do to get a good ending. But it pretty heavily prompted me to do a playthrough 2, at which point I got given a tool which told me that this whole time I was supposed to be balancing the status of 4 different parameters in the world (health, economy, etc). And I guess I was just supposed to know this was a secret objective, as well as correctly guess exactly which esoteric things I was supposed to be balancing.
But even with this newfound knowledge, it was a game of total guesswork. For example, I could be presented with a banker, and be pretty sure that killing them would have some effect on the 'economy' stat. But it honestly seemed to be a 50/50 shot as to whether that effect would be positive of negative, and had very little to do with anything written in their profile. I did manage to eke out a victory in playthrough 2, but I never felt like things were under control, and when things started getting bad it never felt like it was my fault. Honestly, it's just quite an unpleasant experience to try and win a game where you are told neither the rules nor the objective. I honestly think that Death and Taxes would have been better off stripping the core gameplay entirely and just resigning to be purely a visual novel.
So yeah. Despite an admittedly heavy dose of charm and intrigue in the writing and presentation, the core game in D&T was so flawed that it just couldn't quite win me over in the end. There is a spark of magic here, some 'greater than the sum of its parts' experience, and it has had me playing and thinking about it for longer than it has any right to, so it must be doing something right. It does definitely get better the more time you give it. But despite this, and in spite of having some of the best-written characters from any game I've played this year, I still don't really know whether I can recommend this one.