Have a Nice Death is like The Office as a morbid roguelike

digitaltrends.com:

Upcoming Steam early access game Have a Nice Death isn’t just an action roguelike starring the Grim Reaper. It’s a workplace comedy inspired by The Office.

In this new indie game from Unruly Heroes developer Magic Design Studios, players control a personification of Death who’s burnt out from being the CEO of Death Incorporated. It turns out that the underworld is run by a dreary corporation that drains the life out of its employees just as much as the ones on the mortal plane do. Overworked and underappreciated, players track down the Sorrows, which are Death Inc. executives ignoring their duties to cause chaos on Earth. Death has to show them who’s boss and possibly make their job a little more enjoyable.

In practice, Have a Nice Death is a side-scrolling action-roguelike that takes place in the various departments of Death Inc., which include addiction, pollution, and more. This game will grab players’ attention thanks to its wonderful animation and bombastic abilities, but has the potential to be much more relatable on a deeper level thanks to its setting and themes.

Envisioning the underworld isn’t exactly a new concept in games — Death’s Door and Hades both had a similar approach to portraying the afterlife — but the developers of Have a Nice Death made it clear that this is a game more about workplace struggles and burnout than dying. Death can’t actually die. To him, RIP actually means “rest in paperwork.”

To realize this vision, the developers at Magic Design Studios had to draw from their own experience and hope players will do the same. “We started to think about our own experiences as employees in corporations,” narrative designer Mérédith Alfroy tells Digital Trends. “Everybody knows what it is to work, so