Saturday Morning Gaming: Death and Taxes

A million years ago, I reviewed “Papers, Please“. That was a game where you were a border guard who was in charge of checking passports against official guidance and deciding who would be allowed to cross the border.

The game came out and asked you to make decisions that would impact various people who were just trying to get by. You had to process people every day to make rent and buy food and buy medicine and if you didn’t process enough people, you had to make some hard decisions. And if you made a mistake (allowing someone through who wasn’t supposed to be allowed through, you’d take a financial hit as well).

It very quickly got very depressing to play.

In Death and Taxes, you play a newly minted Grim Reaper.

Every day, you are given a set of rules and a set of people and asked “which of these people have to die?”

Read each profile, figure out who has it coming.

Sometimes the rules say “X people have to die”. Sometimes they say that people with science backgrounds need to be spared or people who are a particular age need to be targeted.

The people profiles are funny and well-written. Sometimes you can see the writer’s fingers on the scale and they deliberately write the profile to be as sympathetic or unsympathetic as possible and then you check the profile against the rules and feel a moment’s irritation or guilt that this person needs to be the opposite of what you’re inclined to do.

At the end of the day, you check in with Fate (or Fate’s assigned replacement) and get a debrief of how well you did (or how awfully) and you go back to your room to get ready for the next day. Your little phone gives you a brief rundown of the day’s obituaries and headlines involving the people who escaped death and you get to go through it all again.

On the weekends there’s a bar you can visit and co-workers you can chat with and a little store that can sell you stuff for your desk like a fidget spinner or a coin to help you make the really *TOUGH* decisions.

There’s a bit of a meta-story, though. Something is happening on the planet and your glimpse into it is through the little notes in the profiles and the obituaries and headlines.

And, eventually, you have to make a much more important choice: Are you going to follow the rules? What would it take to get you to break them?

It’s a game that is in the same vein as Papers, Please but is significantly less depressing (despite the topic).

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is a screenshot of the character creation screen. All screenshots taken by the author.)