Death and Taxes
Release Date Developer Publisher 10 Sep 2020 Placeholder Gameworks Placeholder Gameworks
Drawing clear inspiration from Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please, the primary mechanic of Death and Taxes is shuffling papers around your desk and stamping profiles with either “Live” or “Die” following a semi-strict set of rules. The appeal of the game, though, like Papers, Please comes from the variety of outcomes based on which humans you decide to send six feet under.
The game itself is fairly short, lasting only 28 days (each equal to one packet of various profiles you’ll need to mark for death or not), but this encourages the player to return to the game and see what they can do differently. Can you save humanity? Can you escape your monotonous life as a document processor in the underworld? Can you comprehend the human condition?
With a penchant for philisophical musings, the game forces the player to decide if they can truly judge a person’s character. And, in my opinion, Death and Taxes allows the player to express themselves well in dialogue menus, letting you roleplay as personalities like “the boss’s butt-kisser”, “the nihilist”, or “the corporate ladder climber”. Although subsequent playthroughs grow increasingly stale, players will easily be motivated to try a few different endings, as they are encouraged to by the game’s various characters.