As much as I’ve enjoyed playing Have A Nice Death, I enjoy looking at it even more. The 2D roguelike has you take on the role of the Grim Reaper, travelling through Death Inc. to get your corporate (in)subordinates back in line. It’s a charmingly bizarre plot that, given it’s setting in a company responsible for all death, lends itself well to some macabre imagery.
However, Have A Nice Death goes above and beyond in every aspect of its style. The game is gorgeously animated with great character and environmental designs, including many elements that put it up there with the games with the best art styles for me (even if the list writers here at DualShockers are yet to clock onto that fact).
Let’s start with the animation. I have some small experience in animating and some knowledge of its fundamentals, so I certainly appreciated a lot of the details here. The game is incredibly fluid. The animation on every creature is smooth to a ridiculous extent, yes, but what really gives the motion oomph is actually when the game drops frames. When some enemies telegraph an attack or when the game wishes to emphasize the wind-up for one of your more potent attacks, the frame rate for the animation falls to the point that it looks like only the major poses in the cycle are drawn. These wind-ups usually precede a sudden burst of action — such as a flying enemy shooting a projectile, or you, Death himself, slamming down with a Behammorth or a Slaymore.
If you’ll indulge me flexing my animation nerd creds for a sec, this is taking the principle of anticipation (the idea that an animated character should prepare before taking an action to exaggerate the movement and sell the impact of the action) to a natural extreme; the slowdown sells the effort involved with an action and serves a gameplay purpose of giving the player time to react, helping the player intuit that certain weapons will require precision use so that their wind-up period doesn’t result in baddies getting a free hit, and making the crunchy feeling of tearing your foes apart all the more satisfying.
Another principle of animation is ‘appeal.’ Referring to the design of animated elements themselves, that characters should be visually interesting and convey information about the thing being animated with minimal detail. The characters of Have A Nice Death achieve this excellent, delivering a style reminiscent of Disney (particularly reminding me of their black-and-white cartoons – The Blot from Epic Mickey, and the gargoyles from Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Rayman Legends (which isn’t particularly surprising since some of the animators for Have A Nice Death worked on that game).
The character designs are superb. There’s not only the wholesome horror of skeletons, zombies, and ghosts, but also some grisly stuff such as NPCs with their skin missing, miasmatic incarnations of industrial waste, undead remnants of human warfare, flying labcoats brandishing backstabbing syringes, and more. Have A Nice Death isn’t just a kid-friendly collection of spooks, and portrays some dark, gory imagery (bordering on intentional horror designs) wrapped up in a satirical, comical bow. Not that there’s anything wrong with Halloween-costume affairs, but I’m glad to see some genuine comedy-horror in the game.
The backgrounds fit perfectly into the dark vibes, with worlds such as the fleshy Physical Illness Department or the apocalyptic skies of the Modern Warfare Department. These backdrops also show how well the game restrains its use of color; most of the environments are various shades of black and white, with a few splashes of distinct color on enemies, in parts of the environment or in your spells and weapons. This makes the colors really pop, emphasizing the spectral quality to each use of bolder color. Even with the brighter environment of the Toxic Food Processing Department, the color there is dulled — creating a morbid environment of ghastly, marinating excess.
As someone whose game library is filled with eye-pleasing titles, Have A Nice Death threatens to top my list for favorite games in terms of pure visual design. Its animation is beautifully fluid while still knowing when to pull back the frame rate to sell a motion, in the same vein of films like Puss in Boots 2 or Spiderverse. The art direction uses color sparingly and sticks to cartoonish yet macabre look throughout every moment of the experience. Magic Design Studios’ have made a game that belongs in a gallery.
