Will you overcome the challenge and defeat Clark Fackerberg?
The Halloween spirit is missing! Play as Scary and help him save HallowTown. “Death or Treat” is a 2D action-roguelite and hack & slash, with handpainted environments and traditional animation. Discover a huge world with lots of rooms, explore new maps in every run while you try to survive the hordes of enemies. It’s not an easy task, every world is even more tricky than the other. Starting with Darkchat, the Storyum lab, Riptok, the most used app, Deviltube, leaders distributing storyum, and the last but not least FaceBoo!, the ultimate epic frontier.
Death or Treat is a mixture of roguelite platformer, hack-n-slash mixed with a dash of social commentary in the form of nods to social media knockoffs like Riptok, Deviltube and Faceboo to name a few. It is quite amusing at first to paint not Mark Zuckerberg but “Clark Fackerberg” as the main bad guy and there’s other funny names like “Joe Bite Them” who is a vampire knock off of the current US President. But jokes aside, how is the actual game?
Surprisingly, Death or Treat begins very easily and offers not much in terms of challenge. I went a good 30-40 mins without dying and I only died because I had kind of lost interest by then, so I wanted to see what would happen when I did. As with most roguelites, you get perks for your next playthrough and with this, you can find shortcuts to get back to a previous area quicker than before. In that sense, the game is quite linear. The final act does step things up a considerable notch but it feels like it comes a bit too late.
The visuals are handpainted and charming in their design. It definitely looks the part but it does have some odd performance woes with framerate drops that I wasn’t expecting to see in a game that looks like this, especially running on a system as advanced as the PS5. It’s not game-breakingly bad, but it can make you lose focus during things like boss fights when you really could do without an epic framerate plummet. I hope they do patch it because the visuals are a real highlight and the soundtrack is fairly good too.
The Verdict
Death or Treat has some good ideas and some amusing jokes, even if they are a bit overused…but it does have its share of issues. The framerate drops feel bizarre for a 2D game in 2023 and while the game’s combat is fun, it doesn’t have much challenge for a while, which can make it feel a bit stale in its design. I would come back if it gets patched, but I wouldn’t say no to buffing the enemies a little for a real challenge.