Death or Treat Review (PS5)

A little too early for Halloween there.

Death or Treat, as you can guess, is Halloween themed as everyone in this universe are either ghosts, ghouls, sentient pumpkins, and well anything scary that’s Halloween themed like bats. You, in particular, play as a ghost named Scary who owns Ghost Mart. Ghost Mart seems to be a traveling candy store, though in reality it’s the leading candy manufacturer, that is also driven by another ghost named Marshmallow. You arrive at HallowTown, but when Scary opens for the day no one comes right away. As I’m over here thinking how he needs to give people time, a newspaper hits Scary with headlines that Storyum is the new cool drug and candy is out.

With his business in danger, Scary decides to go up against those threatening his business knowingly or unknowingly. You soon find out that means going up against parodies of social media and a parody of their CEO (or creator). You also learn that Hallowtown is abandoned, which wasn’t that apparent in the opening cutscene, and the only one that stayed was Jobs. So not only will you be aiming to defeat all the bosses, but also restore HallowTown by repairing the shops and bringing the shopkeepers back (which we can assume also brings the regular villagers back). You start at Darkchat, then Riptok, next Deviltube, and then finally Faceboo.

Honestly, I found the story pretty lacking and I don’t see how social media really connected with Hallowtown being abandoned and no one buying candy. The “small businesses” in HallowTown also aren’t really small business as they’re parodies of tech giants and “Joe Bite Them” (who took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize who he’s a parody of). Aside from the first conversation, the characters all just repeat the same thing as well and you only get a story blurb at the beginning of an area and before fighting the bosses. Even for someone like me who gets attached to characters pretty quickly, I didn’t feel attached to anyone.

Part of this is my fault, but I’m disappointed in the direction this went. I missed what the newspapers said in the beginning and I thought Scary was just a small business so I thought this was about big corporations pushing out local businesses and Scary decides to fight back when it started to hit his small traveling store. Considering I thought Storyum was a highly addictive candy (I thought Storyum was the company/factory name that resides in Darkchat) I was confused on why it suddenly went to social media until I rewatched the opening. And then I was disappointed. It’s my fault for assuming the story, but I still can’t help but be disappointed that this wasn’t about you saving HallowTown’s local businesses by going to defeat the big corporations yourself.

Anyway, onto the gameplay. Before starting your run, you can choose what weapon you want and the skill you want. You start with a basic broom handle starting out, but you have access to all three skills starting out. You have your basics, having a basic attack with a max 3 hit combo, a heavy attack, a dodge, and an uppercut (though admittedly I didn’t use this much as it felt unreliable to execute). You also have a gauge for your skill which, depending on what you got, will either transform you into a tornado (which either needs to telegraph that you’re about to transform back or i-frames), throw a boomarang, or call explosive ghostly orbs. Oh and you do have a regeneration aspect, as you can regenerate part of your lost health, but it takes a while and you can’t get hit again or it’ll reset to the new regen value. Each area does have their own set of enemies, mostly unique to their area, but they all do have the same types with some changes to how they attack. There’s the small enemies, enemies that fly and send projectiles, spiders, and big enemies that hit hard and can damage you when the die and fall down. Enemies upon death will drop candies and hopefully their ingredient drop or a health drop. There’s also a chance you’ll get a stronger varient that hits harder, has more health, but also has a higher chance at dropping an ingredient (and more than one).

Platforming is good and veering off will get you to discover more blue containers to get candies, but it does have that annoying aspect where if you jump right before the end of the platform you’ll slip off rather than jump. I also did like the layouts each area can get and surprisingly there was more variety than I thought, but Deviltube and Faceboo can have some annoying layouts (specifically a certain castle layout Faceboo has).

You can actually just spam attacks as all but the big enemies can be stunlocked. To combat this though, the game throws a lot of enemies at you, lets them spam attacks like you (it’s not obvious until elevators come in), let projectiles reach long distances, it takes a second or two for you to dodge after an attack animation (which can be deadly towards the bigger enemies and bosses), and your dodge doesn’t have i-frames so dodging through attacks isn’t an option. I mean, I guess it’s fair, but that doesn’t mean I can’t hate it.

Enemies and each area in general are pretty annoying, but they do get less annoying as you go through them more and learn the different layouts, enemies, and bosses. So normal roguelite/roguelike aspect.

Each area has seven rooms, with five of them being ones with a bunch of enemies for you to get through. Before the boss, you do get a choice of buying potions that can give you buffs, debuffs, or both, but it’s going to be a mystery until you buy and (auto)drink it. You will also be given a choice between two boons to pick up, which can give you a boost in certain aspects like quicker skill recharge, added perk like a damaging jump, or get a little friend to fight with you. Going into the bosses, aside from the first one they are well designed. They still need to be tweaked so there’s more of a windup and not being able to spam attacks, but they’re good otherwise.

A little tip though, I found the best weapons being the ranged ones. It has the downside of not doing well in tight spaces and being terrible in the first boss fight, but it really helps out being able to attack across the screen, easily reach flying enemies and spiders, and being able to attack bosses from a distance.

Once you die or defeat Fackerberg, you’ll be asked what ingredients you want to bring back and return to HallowTown. At first you’ll be unlocking the shops with ingredients, but after that you’ll be working towards upgrades. You’ll be able to upgrade your skills, health, regeneration, and inventory space, and unlock new weapons. There’s quite a variety of weapons, which I really like (especially since one is a chainsaw).

However, it is so grindy. The first upgrades aren’t that bad, but after that it asks for ingredients only bosses drop and they only randomly drop one per defeat. It also doesn’t help that you can’t bring everything you got as you’re limited by inventory space. You do get a temporary additional space when you go to the next area and you can upgrade to get a permanent additional inventory space, but you likely won’t be able to bring everything unless you died in Darkchat and upgrades cost ingredients. It’s to the point where not a lot is worth wasting ingredients on and weapons took the highest priority for me. There is a shop where you can trade for ingredients, but that doesn’t make it less grindy as it calls for other ingredients. Luckily you can defeat Fackerberg with little upgrades.

Now for something that seems unimportant, but actually kind of is: cohesiveness. Death or Treat has a problem with cohesiveness and it bothered me. Darkchat/Storyum and Faceboo fits more or less, but not the other two. Riptok verges on it as it doesn’t outwardly feel like it’s specifically parodying TikTok but more Instagram/Twitter as decorations alludes to pictures, selfies, likes, dms, and even has a poster that is clearly an instagram post, but I do like the cemetery theming and Clintok (the Riptok’s boss) is so good even the dead can’t stay away. Deviltube, however, is the worst one. Sure there’s the play button on stuff and some video-themed posters, but everything else screams Amazon. There’s boxes everywhere, x-ray machines, more boxes, trucks, loading docks with trucks still being loaded, a Prime banner, and loading vehicles. And if the decorations don’t convince you, the boss is Jeff Beelzeboss aka Jeff Bezos. Why would a Jeff Bezos parody be the boss of a Youtube parody? I was so confused when I was met with Jeff Beelzeboss at the end of Deviltube. Deviltube was obviously supposed to be an Amazon parody, but being set on each area being social media theme hampered this so it was repackaged as a poor Youtube parody.

And this is when I circle back to what I thought this game was about. I feel it would have been better and more impactful if it went all in on “big corporations pushing out local businesses” theme that it slightly alluded to. Storyum fits as it’s more actively pushing Scary’s business out with its highly addictive candy (I know it’s not candy in the game, but hoenstly I originally thought it was as it looks like a factory and the boss is like a mad scientist). An Amazon parody fits as it pertains to everyone in town and can imply pressure that was put on the local businesses. An area that parodies all social media can work as you do need to promote your business and deal with influencers (and man, now I realize this game missed out of influencer parody enemies) and this can even be the area with multiple possible bosses. Admittedly, I’m not sure what the fourth area could be parody wise other than maybe supermarkets like Walmart (which Scary’s business name Ghost Mart funnily enough parodies). And of course have Scary and everyone in HallowTown actually be small business and not parodies of big businesses/corporations.

Through my playthrough I did run into slight performance issues and bugs. Performance-wise I did notice framerate drops when there was a lot of candies going to Scary and Deviltube strangely was the only area with screen tearing. Bugs wise, sometimes the game didn’t register the basic attack/square button or the accept/X button (luckily you can fix it by going into the inventory menu for the former and exiting the menu or bringing up the PS5’s quick meny in the latter); Joe Bite Them’s option between areas to either continue or go back to HallowTown would have one or both options be “Response Button”; Jeff Beelzebub wouldn’t die but continue its walking animation (luckily the game saves each room so a restart and killing him with a skill will let you pass); when I beat the game for the first time I was met with the default amount of inventory bags which was definitely annoying; and I did run into the occasional enemy that didn’t detect that I was there.

I was notified that a patch was coming to consoles to deal with performance issues and some bugs, though it doesn’t look like it’s been released yet (Update: the patch has been released as of 5/19). While it does look like this patch is going to fix most of the bugs I ran into, I still thought it was important to note the bugs I ran into in my playthrough as it did hamper my experience a bit.

This isn’t a bug, but I also found the text hard to read. The text was not only small, but the font chosen made it hard to read.

Verdict

Reflecting back on Death or Treat, I’m having a hard time deciding whether I would recommend this game or not. On one hand, I do like the art style, designs, and the different weapons, and I don’t necessarily regret playing the game; but on the other hand I was annoyed a lot, the balancing to combat you being able to stunlock enemies wasn’t something I liked, and the characters/story was disappointing. Not to mention the social commentary and parodies were weak and left me disappointed as it was so close in going for commentary that felt would have been more impactful and cohesive.

Though, I can’t deny that while I don’t regret playing Death or Treat, there are better games out there that I could have played. Death or Treat is an okay game. If you don’t care about story or the social commentary here, want a game where you can kick parodies of Bezos and Zuckerberg, how grindy it is to get upgrades, and fine with how the combat is, sure I guess pick this up. I do recommend waiting for a discount though.