Death or Treat is a 2D action-roguelite hack and slash game in beautiful hand painted environments with traditional animation developed by Saona Studios, and published by Hawthorn Games. Saona Studios a relatively new indie studio out of Spain, and Death or Treat is their first game.
Death or Treat Story
You play as Scary, the owner of Ghost Mart, who is the leading manufacturer of Halloween candy in HallowTown. The Halloween spirit is gone and Ghost Mart is on the brink of bankruptcy. Clark Fackerberg, founder of FaceBoo! has started distributing Storyum, a drug that sucks all the Halloween spirit from HallowTown’s inhabitants. Scary must take down Clark Fackerber and FaceBoo! along with its three divisions Darkchat, Riptok and Deviltube, the leading distributer of Storyum. As you explore the enemy-filled areas you will be collecting candy and ingredients, which are used to upgrade your health, forge new weapons, unlock magic attacks, and increase your inventory space.
During your playthrough you will come across special powers at random. These powers can be used until you die. Some of the powers were Wilson, an orange pumpkin head that shoots at enemies, a shield that cancels the first hit, extra health and increased damage. Most of these seem to do very little in helping the player.
Death or Treat‘s levels are small and aren’t procedurally generated. A handful of random level will be pick each time you die. Scary has the ability to double jump, dash and has a main and secondary attack. You can also do an uppercut and slam, which is a type of butt slam. Your starting weapon is an old broom and you have three special powers to choose from; Ghost Explosion, Jumpscare and Boo!merang. I messed around with all of them and Ghost Explosion is the best of them all. Boo!merang doesn’t work well if you or your enemies are on a different levels and Jumpscare is a type of Tasmanian devil spin with little damage.
Death or Treat is a mixed bag
Every death you choose a weapon and power and as you level, new weapons and powers are unlocked. Using your special attack requires you to refill your bar. You do this by smashing green bottles through the world. The problem with this is only certain green bottles break while others are for decoration. If you look closely, you will see two different greens; the lighter one you can smash, the bright green you can not. I’m not sure why they thought this was a good idea. You do come across a store where you can buy mystery potions. Some help, some hurt, but most of them I didn’t notice a difference and began to skip on buying them.
There are many times the double jump doesn’t work like it should. As a game mechanic this gets frustrating fast as you miss your jumps over and over again. If you attempt to use a heavy attack while dashing, you end up doing a slam which is not always the desired outcome. Certain pesky enemies have homing shots that almost never miss and there’s a lack of healing items.
While Death or Treat is a beautiful game, it suffers from frame rate drop issues at times, especially when collecting a lot of candy. These were minor as they didn’t affect the game much, but luckily there’s a day-one patch coming when the game releases. I did all of my playthrough on PS5 and the frame rate drop might affect the PS4 version more. Death or Treat has no voice actors and the text style can be difficult to read. I do wish the front was a different style. Since this is an independent title, the options are scarce and nearly non-existent. You can alter the text language and modify the audio settings.
My Final Thoughts
My time with the Death or Treat was a love-hate relationship. Sadly I didn’t enjoy all my time like I was hoping. I wouldn’t recommend this to new players of roguelite games. The upgrade system, lack of health stats, the grind and that feeling of zero accomplishment when you die make it hard to enjoy. Other roguelite or (roguelike) games, like Hades, provide a much better sense of accomplishment even when you die.
Death or Treat was released May 5th for PS5 and Switch, and releasing May 11th on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam May 11th.
