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Death And Taxes lets you not think about the value of lifeThe big standing desk in the sky
The big standing desk in the sky
Death And Taxesis a fun little balancing act, reminiscent ofPapers, Please. It doesn’t quite reach the lofty heights of Lucas Pope’s excellence in that border crossing simulator, but is nevertheless a good experience in its own right. You play as a newly created (and customisable) Grim Reaper, in a world where death is a bean-counting job in an office. You assign your ultimate judgement using a big marker pen and a magic fax machine. Hence the name of the game, right? Your boss is Fate, and he gives you quotas each day that you have to fill. Fate has a nice bow tie. But at the same time as all this, the people who live and die also have an effect on the world, and some of them are objectively worth less than others (and in the game?!).
So once you have that, you start seeing little clouds of pluses or minuses appear around the flag and the tree and such as you kill someone or let them live. “Hmm,” says you, “that smug bank-lord wanker being alive is great for the economy but worse for everything else.” His continued existence is, then, a net loss for the world. Into the fax machine of death he goes.
Then, later on, you can buy a lamp that shows the gain/loss ratio of any person if you hold their file under the light. So you can make your judgements on a factual, objective basis without reference to the little bit of text describing whether or not Gary the barista is nice to his cat or not.
But then if I were, to create an example from nowhere, to look at a politician called something silly like Jeremy Smyth-Figg, who probably hums Land Of Hope And Glory while he wanks to offset theshameof touching himself, and as far as I can see cares not a jot for the respect and dignity of e.g. poor people, and has in my estimation made the world a worse place to live… wouldn’t I love to hold his balance sheet under a magic light that told me it was okay to think that? That it doesn’t matter if he loves his children or donates thousands to donkey sanctuaries, because the world would still be better off without him?
The way that Death And Taxes makes you think about death and the value of life - or, rather, allows you to observe yourselfnotthinking about it - is very interesting, and I enjoyed it a lot. It felt particularly apposite to the world right now, because there are some people in the game who are technically worthless.
Death And Taxes is out now onSteam
