Death and Taxes is certainly a quirky game that is distinct in the visual novel genre. It is also a management sim akin to Papers Please in that you have to choose who lives and dies based on rules given to you where in papers Please you had to choose who to allow into the country. The big difference to me was that Death and Taxes was a lot more lax with the rules in that you could choose to not follow them and the story branched into a different path rather than end with you and your family dead. You make more money by following the rules but to be honest there wasn’t anything to spend it on that affected the game. You can get trinkets for your desk but nothing that is needed. You also need money to drink at the bar on weekends but to be fair even if you don’t drink there you can talk to the bartender and patrons to learn more about the background of the reaper business. The art is great and you can make your Grim Reaper look different enough that most people should be satisfied. I will say there was a couple times where they had white text on a white background that was hard to read. The voice acting was largely fantastic aside from a couple characters. I will single out Cerri the bartender and Fate for the best voice acting. I also loved the character of Lady Pawdington, Fate’s cat and your boss in his absence. Whoever made that character must have cats because they nailed their attitude. The end of the game seemed a bit flat for it’s lead up. I expected more to happen or to be revealed but it was much simpler than expected. The end credits was also unique as you get to decide the fate of each of the team while learning who did what. The game lasts for twenty eight in game days of decisions.
I played Death and Taxes on Linux. It never crashed on me; and I didn’t notice any glitches or spelling mistakes. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game would save on exit and there was just the one save file. One annoying thing I found was that I couldn’t advance the text with the “Enter” button, I had to press continue with the mouse.
Game Engine: Unity
Save System: Auto on exit
Graphics API: OpenGL
Game Version Played: 1.2.11
Disk Space Used: 2.5GB
GPU Usage: 0-79 %
VRAM Usage: 1088-1638 MB
CPU Usage: 2-4 %
RAM Usage: 1.9-2.3 GB
Many of the gripes I found with Death and Taxes were minor. I do wish the ending had been stronger though. Overall I enjoyed it and found it to be a great combination of management sim and visual novel that didn’t try to be too difficult on the management side and had a great number of choices for the dialogue on the visual novel side. I paid $19.03 CAD for it and finished it in three hours. I found the price to be good value for it given the combined strengths where it did well.
My Score: 7.5/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.0.2 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.0.2 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.11.14-1-MANJARO