Preview: Death or Treat [PC DEMO]

From the minds at Saona Studios comes a devilishly delightful game, Death or Treat Grind through the ghoulish garrisons of the dead and fight to overthrow a maniacal corporate mind. A vibe between The Nightmare Before Christmas and Hollow Knight, prepare for a petrifying experience. It’s time to eradicate the establishment.

A terrifying tale of corporate carnage

In Death or Treat, the Halloween hovel of HallowTown is in trouble. People are no longer eating, buying, or trading in candies, instead consuming Storyum. You play as Scary, a sheet ghost who runs the traveling shop of GhostMart. Determined to bring down the evil factory creating Storyum, you will pick up your trusty broom stick and charge into the depths of the devil’s lair.

One of the best things about Death or Treat is the art-style. The backgrounds are hand-painted, and beautifully designed. The writing is fantastic as well. NPCs are hilarious references to various other businesses, all uniquely designed and well animated. These NPCs in HallowTown run stores that you can help rebuild with resources you find on your individual runs.

A horrific happenstance

Death or Treat has a familiar rogue-like gameplay loop you can expect of a platformer. Begin the run, kill enemies, survive as long as you can. If and when you die, you are sent back to HallowTown and you can spend the various candies, brain matter, and splintered wood to open up the various shops. Skills, weapons, health boosts and more are all eventually open to you as you complete runs and amass loot.

This game does however suffer from some drawbacks. One of the issues comes with the enemies AI. There are several instances where if a certain type of enemy spawns in the level, even if I can’t see it knows where I am. And it then throws very accurate and very dangerous bombs at me from off screen. I’ve had multiple runs die to me spawning in and taking a ton of damage. There is also a lot of levels where enemies just don’t respond to being attack, hitting and stun-locking you and thusly ending the run.

There also is some animation delay when it comes to attacking in some cases. Death or Treat has an amazing hand-painted design in their animation, but as a result, there is a large window after making an attack where you can’t move at all. A lot of the AI will be able to exploit this due to the number of enemies at play at any given point. It’s not a huge issue, but it can make playing the game frustrating when you are trying to get away before you see an enemy charging and you can’t.

An Entertaining Eldritch End

Death or Treat is a beautiful game with a ton of potential. Once the full release is live there is a very good chance this will become one of the new top played games in the rogue-like genre. The only downsides are the aforementioned issues. While few, they do keep the game from being truly great. But hey, time will tell.

Death or Treat currently has no release date. More information to come. Demo is available as part of Steam’s Next Fest through February 13, 2023.