Death Coming

Oh yeah, Death is 1337 in this world it seems.

Death Coming is a pixelly puzzle game where you control Death to cause ‘accidents’ to kill everyone on a map. It’s pretty simple, you died and Death says, “Hey, if you help me harvest some souls then I’ll bring you back to life”, so you set out to do exactly that. You click on objects to make them fall or wait for weather changes to use new death dealing objects. It’s fun for the whole family, providing you’re not on Death’s list. This being said, Death seems fairly… what’s the word… insane? He wants a couple people on each level, but he’d be happy for you to just slaughter absolutely everyone on the entire map.

Each level has three special characters and a plethora of normal characters. They all have their own paths they follow and things they do, some of them even have their own personalities. If someone sees an accident or a dead body they run for the hills, but will eventually come back like oh so many guards in other games, to just go right about their day like usual. Though that’s a good thing for the player, otherwise you’d probably never be able to slaughter the whole map. There’s various amounts of people on the map, some of them come and go even, but there is a counter at the top to see how many you’ve killed out of how many are there in total, it also keeps track of the special characters. You can click on the special characters’ icons and be brought right to where they are on the map if you have trouble finding them and they get X’ed out when you kill them. To perfect each level, you have to slaughter the world basically, and it’s doable, you just have to figure out how and what chains together to kill them.

Three special characters, trophy bar, and score beside it. All the makings to do everything to the max.

There’s a scoring mechanic in the game as well, by getting numerous kills in quick succession, to beating it quickly, to not being caught by angels, etc. Angels invade the levels after you get a specific amount of kills, and they’ll increase in more levels as you get more and more kills. If an angel sees you clicking on something they’ll ‘catch’ you and you’ll lose one of your three lives, get caught three times and you gotta restart, provided you haven’t killed enough people to get a bronze trophy. You don’t even have to kill the three special characters to beat the level, just need to get to the bronze trophy, and I think maybe kill one of the three special characters, but I won’t swear to that.

The graphics are pixelly but very bright and colorful, and every one of the technically nine levels is different. Six of them are acts, two are bonus stages that unlock automatically as you progress through the acts, and the last one is an extra stage where you take out some special people and only them this time, which is completely against everything the other levels taught you. The music is repetitive as hell, but it didn’t get on my nerves, just was kinda boring after eleven hours of playing the game.

I have to say I enjoyed the hell out of it, though I don’t think it’s for everyone. I like solving puzzles. I like figuring everything out. I like the challenge of figuring out how to kill each and every NPC to complete the level perfectly. That kind of stuff isn’t enjoyed by everyone and for them this isn’t an easy sale, but it’s a fun game to put an hour or so into every now and then to get better and better at slaughtering everyone.

Death Coming was developed by: NEXT Studios