Death or Treat review - A Halloween delight with more tricks than treats

The rogue-lite genre continues to boom across the market with new entries and installments. The latest kid around the block is Death or Treat from Saona Studios. Although Halloween is not here yet, this brand 2D action rogue-lite fully embraces its spirit. The industry has seen many examples thus far this year itself, so is this a worthy contender?

Can it stand among the all-time greats? Or is it a party that fizzles out before reaching climax? Here's our full review for Death or Treat.

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Cut and slice your way through supernatural entities in Death or Treat

Time to stop Fackerberg (Screenshot from Death or Treat)

Death or Treat takes place in a spooky overworld where players control a ghost called Scary. As the owner of an establishment called Ghost Mart, his newest stop is HallowTown.

Unfortunately potential revenue is being unjustly stolen by the evil corporation FaceBoo! and its sister companies, such as Darkchat and Riptok - all run by the devious Clark Fackerberg. Yes, all of these are clear jabs at popular social media platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, which does feel kind of out-of-place and bizarre for a Halloween-themed game.

On that note, the title wears its spooky celebrations setting on its sleeve. There are four levels to fight through, each distinctly themed and depicted. Riptok, the second level, for example, is washed over with hues of grey and purple. Mummies, witches and other entities beyond the graveyard await Scary's arrival with hostile intentions.

And this brings us to combat. The main draw of Death or Treat is its action gameplay, reminiscent of games like Hollow Knight or Ori.

Each level has devious challenges to overcome (Screenshot from Death or Treat)

In simple terms, it is a 2D hack & slash with ample platforming and rogue-lite aspects. Scary can perform a decent number of moves from the get go. In addition to jumping and dashing, he can double-jump and even use a skill that unleashes a pre-selected move, such as a cloud of homing ghosts.

He also starts off with a broom that has a fast primary attack and a slower secondary swing. Chaining the primary and secondary allows for an uppercut, while using the secondary move mid-air performs a slam.

There is also a "magic" gauge that is used to unleash one of the three skills selected at the start of each run. As a rogue-lite, Death or Treat's players begin at HallowTown and go through a set series of levels leading up to the big bad Fackerberg.

There are many enemies dotted around the randomly generated levels to defeat and each area culminates in a challenging boss fight. Platforming also plays a big role, such as across hazards or tree-tops. Also as expected, death sends Scary back to HallowTown, resetting all progress except for the materials collected.

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Build HallowTown as a haven for your scary allies

The quaint town is home to chill denizens

The goal of the game is to flourish HallowTown once again. Players must strive to bring back all the minor businesses in the town, which include an assortment of shopkeeper NPCs like a Frankenstein's monster and a vampire. Each benefit Scary in one way or another, from unlocking health upgrades and skill enhancements to new weapons and increased inventory space.

This is done by collecting candies found from both enemies and levels, as well as monster parts, dropped by different kinds of foes. Players have a limited inventory, so they must be mindful of what they carry.

But back at the village, these can be turned in to establish new shops and also used in purchasing various items and upgrades on sale. The big highlight would be the weapons shop which features many different weapons to pick from.

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A taste of sour design

The biggest problem with Death or Treat is its near constant fumbling over basic design aspects. For how fluid the combat is, it often ends up feeling janky and lacking basic, no-brainer inclusions.

The dash, for one, lacks invincibility frames. While this is not an issue in the first level, it can become hectic later on with projectiles all over the screen which are a pain to avoid witout i-frames. The Skill also uses up the entie bar and cannot be activated again until completely full - which is an odd design choice.

To make matters worse, neither the dash nor attack combo chains can be cancelled into one another. So players performing the secondary move on the brute enemy type encountered in the Storyum factory area may find themeselves unable to get out of the way of its heavy-hitting swing.

At the very least, the game features no collision damage for Scary running into enemies - unless they attack of course. But wait, there's more.

Much of the combat depth goes underutilized due to how simplistic the enemies are. Players will often face mindless hordes of zombies and more, but many can be infinitely juggled using the secondary attack. Then there is the opposite end with super tanky foes marked with a red skull icon over their head.

While they drop a lot of materials, the game's pacing can slow to a crawl during these moments. Conversely, when players find their inventory full, they are left with no choice but to end the run deliberately.

On that note, progresion feels lacking too. For the number of materials and the amount of grinding required, many of the upgrades and rewards feel lackluster. One of the shops in HallowTown offers five upgrades to purchase that enhance the Jumpscare skill, but only boost its active uptime by a measly one second each time.

Out in the open, the area before each boss allows Scary to buy tonics and perks to help him out. The former may boost parameters llike damage, speed, and so on.

As for the perks, these can range from mere agility or damage boosts to friendly minions. Unfortunately, both are random, with the shopkeeper offering zero explaination on what each potion does while what perks spawn is up to RNG.

Yes the former is likely in light of the mischieveous Halloween theme, but it can be off-putting from a gameplay aspect. However, the point remains that the lack of diversity in the long run makes extended sessions of the game less and less enticing.

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Graphics, performance, and sound

Death or Treat boasts a 2D hand-drawn artstyle that is delightful to behold. This is evident from its expressive sprites for both the player character and NPCs, as well as the richly detailed background. Clearly a lot of love and effort went into realizing the spooky confines of HallowTown and beyond. It is certainly the best aspect of the game. The technical side of things is similarly sound.

Death or Treat is a Unity-engine game, a popular choice for 2D titles in the indie scene. While there were some performance hiccups during my first few sessions, subsequent patches drastically improved the frame rate drops.

However, the UI and UX elements do need some polishing. As an example, dialog gives way to a blurred background with a text box and a basic character portrait. Not only is the text pretty small in scale with the rest of the screen, it is a shame the wonderful artstyle is temporarily obscured from view during these segments.

While the Options menu has six different graphical presets to pick from, it is otherwise barebones. Unfortunately, I could not for the life of me discern any signifcant changes between each mode, ranging from Very Low to Ultra. However each of these has a noticable impact on performance, down to as much as a 40% loss in FPS at the highest setting.

I also faced a few bugs, one in particular where two background tracks would loop over one another. At least the soundtrack is another highlight, with orchestral audio reminiscent of its inspirations like Hollow Knight. A sweet thumbs up for this one.

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In conclusion

Death or Treat is a charming rogue-lite action game at first glance. The vibrant presentation, fluid combat, and expressive worlds it takes place in hint at such.

The game also proudly boasts influences from acclaimed titles such as Hollow Knight and Dead Cells, two of the most acclaimed titles in the genre out there. Unfortunately, Death or Treat stumbles over mere pebbles scattered throughout its graveyard of humorous horrors.

This results in some bizarre design decisions that end up being at odds with its core mantra of "fun." In other words, there are many times the game falls into repetitive tedium or general frustration due to how things could have been handled better from a design perspective.

Of course that does not mean Death or Treat is a bad game - in fact, far from it. However, when faced with competition like Supergiant Games' Hades, it is hard to overlook its faults.

Nevertheless, fans of the genre itching for something new might find this latest rogue-lite "horror" worth a pickup.

Final verdict (Image via Sportskeeda)

Death or Treat

Reviewed on: PC

Platform(s): PC, PS5, XSX|S (May 11, 2023) | PS4, Nintendo Switch (TBA 2023)

Developer(s): Saona Studios

Publishers(s): Saona Studios, Perp Games

Release date: May 11, 2023