Death and Taxes are the only things certain in life, so they say. Placeholder Gameworks created this casual game centered around picking and choosing who lives and dies. Fate has created you from lemons to do his bidding and keep the world from complete chaos. Just like the normal world, chaos can be many things, illness, environmental issues and war. You get to decide who dies and why.
Fate sends you profiles via fax to your desk and leaves instructions for you each day, much like the game Papers Please (only easier). You must use your handy-dandy marker and select who gets to bite the bullet that day. The instructions left behind are pretty simple at first but the list of rules grows over time. The rules are straightforward and usually make sense with each profile you read. Although this is not always the case, each profile normally gives a quick review of the personality you are deciding on.
Not only are the profiles kind of funny, but the names are great too. Some of these names are just epic and make you laugh out loud. The art style is a lot like a comic book and very simple which makes focusing on your work a lot easier. The developers added the use of a cellphone to check Cawker, the game version of Twitter. This plays a big role in seeing how you have impacted the world as a whole. As usual, the cellphone can be distracting too, but the choices don’t way too heavily based on the information coming from the information.
Fate checks in often to give you insight to your morality and to let you know if you are doing a good or bad job. In one week’s time virtually, Fate decides whether you get to keep your job or not. Otherwise, you will get written up and fired, much like real jobs. You can talk to Fate from the beginning of the game and the responses are funny, dim-witted and sometimes just nonchalant. On the downside, Fate cutting in to talk all the time drives the game and tends to slow the game down too. This is annoying when Fate doesn’t progress the story. We don’t even know what his whole position is in the game.
One noticeable thing is that the profiles for each person don’t pull at the heart strings like some other games. Each personality could very well be based on real human. You know them, but because they have their good and bad qualities, there is no right choice. This could lead to discussions after the game is turned off. Fate tries to bring out the emotions by asking some thought provoking questions, but in the end, you just have your stamper and a choice.
7/10
Available on PC
